This, too, is grief

When you lose someone you love, you expect grief. 

Ok, maybe you don't have a full grasp of how grief will be like a tidal wave until it isn't - and sometimes still because it cuts you at your knees or sucker punches you in the gut when you least expect it.

But grief as desperately wrenching as it is in its rawest form - that deep hole in your heart, is not only sadness and anguish.

Of course, everyone has heard of the stages of grief, which by the way were meant to describe a patient coming to terms with her/his own death not that of those bereaved. There is anger. There is denial. All of that along side, in between and at disparate times with the sadness and anguish.

I cannot speak to acceptance - unless you are talking about finally agreeing that your loved one is, indeed, dead - as in not coming back. Maybe. But I think lots of people forestall denial by assuming that they will be reunited at some point in the future or the after world. As I do not hold on to that hope, my denial did have to come to an end - but it lasted a good, long time - when I still saw my sister from the corner of my eye, driving by, escaping death even if it meant abandoning us as well.

But grief is also the aftermath.

This is the part that I don't think people talk about.

It has been a horrible place for me - and I imagine that it is for others as well.

Your life is reconfigured. You are told about the new normal when people can be honest about the fact that it does not get better, just different.

But I was wholly unprepared for the devastation that has been the aftermath in my family.

It's not like a war torn landscape with craters were there used to be houses. That seems so bleak and drastic ... but, sometimes, it really does feel that way.

Poetry Thursday, bucking up

Go Give the World

~Otto Leland Bohanan

I do not crave to have thee mine alone, dear

   Keeping thy charms within my jealous sight;

Go, give the world the blessing of thy beauty,

   That other hearts may share of my delight!

I do not ask, thy love should be mine only

   While others falter through the dreary night;

Go, kiss the tears from some wayfarer’s vision, 

   That other eyes may know the joy of light!

Where days are sad and skies are hung with darkness, 

   Go, send a smile that sunshine may be rife;

Go, give a song, a word of kindly greeting, 

   To ease the sorrow of some lonely life!

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on July 12, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.

 

Poetry Thursday, for our times...

Untethered

~Allison Joseph

what anger in defiance

what sympathy in doubt

emotions steady try us

demanding every shout

what sympathy in doubt

what pleasure in our pain

demanding are our shouts

such hazardous terrain

what pleasure in our pain

mere thinness to our skin

such hazardous terrain

such unrelenting din

sheer thinness of our skin

the ruptures and the breaks

such unrelenting din

mistake after mistake

we rupture and we break

we stagger and we shine

mistake after mistake

inhabiting our minds

we stagger and we shine

we live our lives on spin

inhabiting our minds

and undermining limbs

we live our lives on spin

and thrive until we grieve

we undermine our limbs

then get the strength to leave

we thrive until we grieve

emotions steady try us

we get the strength. we leave.

what anger in defiance.

Copyright © 2020 by Allison Joseph. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 13, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets

Sometimes Daily Poetry hits home... one more for you

When Puffy says, and we won’t stop, ‘cause we can’t stop.

~Rasheed Copeland

I think of a good night’s sleep

an exhale taking its precious time

to leave my lungs         unworried

about the breathing to come        If only

I did not hail from the sweet state

of panic                                the town’s river,

my adrenaline raging without cease

I’d love peace but the moon is pulling me by my water

I know this is no way to live    but I was born here

a mobile of vultures orbiting above my crib

the noise you speak      bragging

about the luxury of your stillness

reminds me that some children are told to pick flowers

while others are told to pick a tree switch

that’ll best write a lesson across their hide

and my skin is a master course written in welts

I touch myself and read about the years

I cannot escape                              I hold my kids

and pray our embrace is not a history

repeating itself

Copyright © 2020 by Rasheed Copeland. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 22, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

Not Poetry Thursday but we need some, so here you go

The Optimist

~J. W. Hammond

Who would have the sky any color but blue,

     Or the grass any color but green?

Or the flowers that bloom the summer through

     Of other color or sheen?

How the sunshine gladdens the human heart—

     How the sound of the falling rain

Will cause the tender tears to start,

     And free the soul from pain.

Oh, this old world is a great old place!

     And I love each season’s change,

The river, the brook of purling grace,

     The valley, the mountain range.

And when I am called to quit this life,

     My feet will not spurn the sod,

Though I leave this world with its beauty rife,—

     There’s a glorious one with God!

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on July 11, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday

Peacock Feather

~Effie Lee Newsome

 

Heav’n’s deepest blue,

Earth’s richest green,

Minted dust of stars,

Molten sunset sheen,

Are blent together

On this lithe brown feather,

In a disc of light—

Lithe, light!

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on June 21, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday, with a little history lesson

Governor’s Mansion Hands

~Sean Hill

                              —Milledgeville, Georgia 1858 (note 1)

The hand(note 2) in which the laws of the land(note 3)

were penned was that of a white man.

Hand, servant, same as bondsman, slave,

and necessarily a negro(note 4) in this context,

but not all blacks were held in bondage

though bound by the constructed fetters

of race—that expedient economic tool

for making a class of women and men

kept in place based on the color writ

across their faces—a conservative notion

for keeping power in the hands of the few(note 5).

It kept the threat held over the heads of all

negroes, including those free blacks,

who after the coming war would be

called the formerly free people of color

once we were all ostensibly free.

Hands, enslaved, handled clay

and molds in the making of bricks

to build this big house for the gathering

of those few men with their white faces

who hold power like the end of the rope.

Hand, what’s needed to wed, and a ring

or broom. Hand, a horse measure, handy

in horse-trading(note 6). We also call the pointers

on the clock that go around marking time

in this occidental fashion, handy for business

transactions, hands.

Notes

1 Milledgeville, my hometown, touts itself as the Antebellum Capital and it was that, but it was also, for the duration of the Civil War, the Confederate Capital of Georgia, and where Joseph Emerson Brown, the governor of Georgia from November 6, 1857 till June 17, 1865, lived with his family in the Governor’s Mansion. Governors brought enslaved folks, folks they held as property, from their plantations to work as the household staff at the Governor’s Mansion.

2 Hand as in handwriting, which is awful

in my case, so I type, but way back when,

actually, only 150 years ago—two long-lived

lives—by law few like me had a hand.

3 What’s needed is a note on the laws that constructed race in the colonies and young states, but that deserves a library’s worth of writing.

4 Almost a decade after reading the typescript of a letter written by Elizabeth Grisham Brown, Gov. Joseph Emerson Brown’s wife, I finally got to read the original letter written in her hand; I got to touch it with my hand. I got to verify that she’d written what I’d read in the typescript. I’d thought about this letter she wrote home to her mother and sister at their plantation for near a decade because of its closing sentences: “Hoping you are all well, we will expect to hear from you shortly. Mr. Brown and the children join me in love to you all.” And caught between that and her signing “Yours most affectionately, E. Brown” she writes “The negroes send love to their friends.” Those words in that letter struck me when I first read them and have stuck with me since. There is so much there that speaks to the situation those Black folk were in then and the situation Black folk are in now. I intend for the title of my next book to be The Negroes Send Love to Their Friends.

5 And this arrangement also served the rest

who would walk on the white side of the color

line, so they would readily step at the behest

of that narrative of race and their investment

in what is white and Black.

6 Prospective buyers would inspect Negroes like horses or other livestock and look in their mouths.

Copyright © 2020 by Sean Hill. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 9, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday, life right now for a lot of people

Every Verb is a Lesson in Longing or Dread

~April Freely

Dear Reader, it wouldn’t be a lie if you said poetry was a cover

for my powerlessness, here, on this plane

having ticked off another day waiting for her diagnosis to rise.

As the air pressure picks up, I feel the straight road

curved by darkness, where the curve is a human limit,

where the second verb is mean, the second verb is to blind.

On the other line, my mother sits on her bed

after a terrible infection. Her voice like a wave

breaking through the receiver, when she tells me

that unlike her I revel in the inconclusivity of the body.

+

At the end of the line, I know my mother

accumulates organ-shaped pillows after surgery.

First a heart, then lungs.

The lung pillow is a fleshy-pink. The heart

pillow, a child-drawn metaphor. Both help her expectorate

the costs to the softer places of her body.

After each procedure they make her cross,

the weight of the arm comes down. These souvenirs

of miraculous stuffing other patients on the transplant floor covet,

the way one might long for a paper sack doll made by hand.

Though the stuffing is just wood shavings, one lies

with the doll tight at the crick of an elbow at night.

Copyright © 2020 by April Freely. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 29, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.