Tag: grief poetry

On What Is Woven

Not my image.

Each year I learn her differently
though she has not changed.
I meet her in unexpected places,
over and again when I am not prepared.

Her laughter arrives softer now,
not the ringing peal of twenty-three,
but a quieter note,
teaching me how joy survives absence.

Where once I only saw her gone,
I begin to see her whole—
the child, the woman, the thread of her
woven through my days.

She is the strand I keep weaving,
bright against the darker cloth.
My hands know her pattern
even when my eyes do not.

Grief is not a still picture
but a loom forever moving.
I pull her through the shuttle,
and she becomes part of what I wear.

I wrap myself in her life.

This tapestry becomes
the shroud I will wear
on the day we meet again.

On What Holds Its Breath

When I found an old folder filled with poems I had written years ago, I sat down and reread them with surprise . . . and recognition. I had forgotten how much I love the form of poetry, how it demands chiseling down to only what is necessary. A poem does not allow me to hide behind excess; it asks me to distill, to press thoughts and feelings into their most essential shape.

For years I’ve shared essays and reflections here, weaving stories into paragraphs. Now, I want to also let poems find their place among them. Poetry is another way of carrying the weight and wonder of life, grief, beauty, memory, love, in a form that breathes differently. It may arrive spare or lyrical, but it always asks the same thing prose does: to speak honestly, to hold what matters, and to offer it in words.

Not my image.

A field holds its breath
beneath a low veil of fog.
The grasses bend with dew,
each blade jeweled in silence,
waiting for the sun to rise high enough
to burn the mist away.

This is the hour between.
Not sky, not earth,
not gone, not yet held.
A place where sorrow lingers close,
dampening skin,
refusing to vanish.

Slowly I extend my hand into the vapor,
always hoping she’s reaching back.
Tender quiet is broken by the cry of a loon
from some unseen lake
whose edge I cannot name.

Soon the day will come,
the light will sharpen,
the dew will dry.
But for now,
I belong to the mist,
this tender veil
as thin as a breath,
between what was
and what remains.