Everyday Canvas

A Split-Open Heart

Prompt: ”…Open
your own broken heart. Look how I’ve split
the wood! Look at the golden streaming light!”
In her book Broken Sonnets at the end of the first poem titled Damage, this is what Kathleen Kirk--a.k.a Katya the Poet --saw when she opened her heart.
What do you think you would see if you were to split open your heart?

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Why is it that I find it the most difficult to answer my own prompts? Don’t I know by now that I can’t come close to, in several pages, what Katya can poetically say in a few words?

Let me first take this in the physical sense. If I were to split open my heart, I would probably die, unless I was on the operating table for a bypass with a skillful surgeon. Thus, I don’t advise people to split open their hearts this way.

In another sense, if my heart were to be split open, in it I would see my family, all the people I love and have loved, the entire humanity (yes, I love people, no matter what), animals, plants, the planet earth, and my wonder and awe of all creation and its Creator. I might just add shock to my wonder and awe, too, as I was probably more shocked at stuff in the past than anything else and traces of that shock still linger.

Then, in the far corners, I would see the boxes I have stacked. Those, I don’t go near or even touch too often, as some of them can be hiding Pandora’s kins. The worst is, once something escapes, it takes me days and sometimes months to catch and lock it back in its box.

On the other hand, I have always hoped that the golden streaming light, which Katya mentions and I sometimes feel in me, will turn all my locked boxes into solid gold, and even if I open them, I’ll find everything inside to have shapeshifted into love, forgiveness, acceptance, and understanding.