Step One In Al-Anon
Step one in Al-anon
Is harder than step one
To those affected by disease –
Not in itself
But for the reason
Life was kind to us –Our genes were right;
Our home was sweet;
And we succeeded to the throne
Where we now sit and reign,
Because our parents
And our kin
Made choices
Which have eased
Our present load.Step one in Al-Anon –
I fight to let it speak into my heart –
Because I’m not the one
To blame for why
And how
We came into this place
Of awful rest.Step one in Al-anon
Confronts me with myself;
Not in its broken form,
But in its arrogance,
Of high and mighty self –
Assured forever,
That I could have
Pushed the bounds
Of present life,
If only she or he
Had never
Crossed that
Crucial threshold
To my life.Step one exists
To give a channel to our hearts
To say the words
Which many ’fore today
Have poured out here before
Thy throne of grace
O Lord –Those words which lead
Up to the plaintive step-two cry –
“I came, O Lord;
Came to, O Lord;
Came to believe,
O Lord”.Step one exists
To help us start to view
Our paltry lives
In which we hold such pride –Confronting us
In ways unique to each
With this –
The plain reality
Of lack of power –While swath behind
Extends far to the distant past,
And tells a tale
We’d rather
Soon forget –A tale of life
Not managed well –
Not well at all –
And yet a life
Which husbands or our wives
Quite soon
Will meet –As psychotropic drugs
Fall from their lives
Which eased their pain,
Or lubricated
Rough,
Uncertain ways.For then they’ll find
That all along
Our lives are quite the same –
Which we have also found –That we’re not only powerless
When faced with booze,
Or drugs, or other ways
To cope with life too hard –We’re powerless:
The management of life
Has slipped away,
And we now face
The grim reality
Of being stuck.We cannot move –
We can’t get out –
And now we face the fact
We need to summon help;
Just like that time
We left the road,
And found our traction gone
There in the ditch.But here –
Here at the first –
There comes for all of us –
A troubled day,
When we admit
We’re powerless,
And life has now become
So twisted and mixed up,
We can
No longer
Live:Our arms can’t hold –
Our hearts can’t bear –
Our minds can’t think –
Our love expires –
The day
When we at last
Admit –
We’re powerless.For when the illness
Which afflicts the life of one we love,
Is truly seen for what it is
We must admit –
It far exceeds resources which we bring
Into the life and times
Of our small clan –It’s then –
That day or night when we let go
And say in desperate agony of heart,
“I do –
I do admit
I have not power or resource
To hold our
Family’s life
Together
One more day –“I do –
I do admit
I have no strength to carry on
Before the creeping onslaught
Of its steady grinding
Ways.“I do –
I do admit –
I’m powerless;
And life as it’s now lived –
The part at least for which
I am responsible –
No longer works.“For no,
Unmanageable it is–
Nor will it ever managed be –
For I have clean run out of tricks.“And now?
The energy to fake a life
Which I can’t hold
Together one more day –
It’s gone.“O Lord –
If there is not some help
Outside the resource of my life –
This is the end.“For I admit
My lack of power,
And that this life
Now goes beyond
My power to manage
Or to fix.“Please, help me, God.”
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