Learning to Take the Punch
Poetry and Prose by Britt Wolfe
There’s a silence that happens before the blow—
a thin, electric stillness
where time forgets how to move.
In that pause, you can feel everything:
the tremor of fear,
the body calculating escape,
the mind whispering not again.
I used to think wisdom meant stepping aside,
that peace was earned by outsmarting impact.
But evasion is a slow kind of dying—
you trade every battlefield for a smaller room
and call it safety.
No one tells you that peace has weight.
It isn’t light. It isn’t quiet.
It’s the body deciding to remain
in the very place it once swore
it could not survive.
So now, when life winds its fist,
I don’t move.
I let the air split open.
I let the truth connect.
I let the sound bloom through my ribs
like thunder finding its echo.
This is not martyrdom.
This is mastery.
The refusal to spend my life
flinching at ghosts.
The understanding that pain
is only permanent
when you keep running from it.
I have learned the texture of endurance—
how to let sorrow enter,
circle,
and leave
without carving its name into me.
I have learned that peace is not the absence of pain,
but the unclenching around it.
So I take the punch.
I take it clean.
I take it whole.
And when the dust settles,
I am still here—
breathing, bleeding, luminous.
Because the secret is this:
the world was never asking me not to hurt.
It was asking me to stay.
And I did.
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Poetry Anthologies by Britt Wolfe
