Poem

Traffic Light

© Linda Grantham

This traffic light inside my head
Is always green and never red.
My thoughts, my dreams, and all my fears,
They all speed past my listening ears.

I close my eyes to block it out,
But inside my head they rush about.
I take a breath to slow it down,
But upon my face appears a frown.

My heart beats fast,
But my breathing slows.
I breathe in life
Then out it goes.

My body’s numb,
Yet I feel my tears.
I’ve lost count of the days,
The months, and the years.

This traffic light 
Inside my head…
I’m scared of the day 
When it turns red.

This poem by Linda Grantham is about how depression is played out in her head, what she thinks about and the struggle it presents her. This poem represents fear in the sense of the unknown, she is never going to be aware of when depression will come over her and how her body will react each time.

My initial reaction to the text is that fear is very obvious , but to anyone else you wouldn’t see this person withholding fear, I relate to her in the way that the mind is a powerful and scary thing, when my aunty passed away my head was filled with fear, mostly that the same thing would happen to my mum or another family member, this is how my connection was created with this poem.

The quote from her poem “I close my eyes to block it out,
But inside my head, they rush about” shows us that her body and mind communication tries to block out the internal fear of her depression without success. Mental depression also known as clinical depression is seen throughout the poem, although I haven’t had to deal with depression, I understand the mental challenge of dealing with her thoughts, we all have challenges and ideas in our head that we try to block out and get rid of. Everyone in society has different beliefs and values, mono-phobia is the fear of your own mind, what you see in your head and not in the real world is unbelievable, I feel the poem can relate to this as she used the idea of a “traffic light”, she referred to this as the way she was feeling, that if she got to the point where she was in the state of red she wouldn’t know what to do

Another example of fear in the text is the miscommunication of your dreams versus your fear, “My thoughts, my dreams, and all my fears” shows that she places her dreams and her fears together, when someone gets to the point where your fears and your dreams interloop with each other there is a misbalance. I relate to the idea in this text in the way where your dreams can portray your fears, when my Aunty passed away this year, my fear of losing someone in my family came to the surface, this is when the overlap of my fears and dreams started, I began to have nightmares about losing someone else. Often in society when a traumatic event occurs our dreams turn into nightmares, it’s not something we can control or push away.

The poem portrays fear in many different forms, I feel that the key things to take away from this poem are that we can’t always control it, the mental struggle of controlling our thoughts can cause fear within us and that everyone has to deal with our own mind damaging us. Although fear isn’t always obvious from the outside, lots of people are dealing with it internally and to make an assumption if somone is fearful or not is wrong.