Wound Cleaning

This poem uses the physical experience of cleaning a wound as a metaphor for the painful work of healing.

Removing what has become embedded in us can hurt intensely, sometimes making the wound feel worse before it begins to feel better.

The pain does not immediately disappear once the wound is clean.

But there is a profound difference between the pain of something still festering and the sting of something finally able to heal.

I think I once expected healing to feel always progressively better.

If I was doing the work, surely there should be less pain. More peace. Some clear indication that I was moving in the right direction.

Instead, I found that healing usually hurts more, at least for a while.

There are things we can carry, stuck inside a wound, for a surprisingly long time. Old beliefs. Grief. Shame. Anger. Stories about ourselves and other people. Ways of coping that may once have protected us but eventually became part of what kept the wound from healing.

Removing them can be painful.

That is what the physical metaphor in this poem helped me understand. When dirt becomes embedded in a wound, cleaning it may temporarily increase the pain. You have to touch the place that already hurts and disturb what has settled there.

But the quality of the pain begins to change.

That distinction is what matters most to me in the poem.

By the end, the wound is not healed, but something has changed:

“And it's finally just red
Raw flesh
Exposed to the air
It stings still
But it feels clean”

There is something strangely reassuring about that image.

Rawness can look like regression when we expect healing to look like immediate relief. But sometimes being raw means we have finally reached the actual wound beneath everything that accumulated around it.

The pain remains.

But now there is space for something different to happen.

Sometimes healing begins not when it stops hurting, but when the hurt is finally clean.