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, grief in a poem

Postcard
--Olena Kalytiak Davis

Lately, I am capable only of small things.
Is it enough
to feel the heart swimming?
Jim is fine. Our first
garden is thick with spinach
& white radish. Strangely,
it is summer
but also winter & fall.
In response to your asking:
I fill the hours
then lick them shut.
Today, not a single word, but the birds
quietly nodding
as if someone had suggested
moving on.
What is that perfect thing
some one who once believed in god said?
Please don’t misunderstand:
We still suffer, but we are
happy.


THANKS Julie... I needed that

not Poetry Thursday, but still POETRY

Ghazal !يا لطيف (Ya Lateef!)
~Marilyn Hacker

A lot more malaise and a little more grief every day,
aware that all seasons, the stormy, the sunlit, are brief every day. 

I don’t know the name of the hundredth drowned child, just the names
of the oligarchs trampling the green, eating beef every day,

while luminous creatures flick, stymied, above and around
the plastic detritus that’s piling up over the reef every day.

A tiny white cup of black coffee in afternoon shade,
while an oud or a sax plays brings breath and relief every day. 

Another beginning, no useful conclusion in sight‚—
another first draft that I tear out and add to the sheaf every day. 

One name, three-in-one, ninety-nine, or a matrix of tales 
that are one story only, well-springs of belief every day.

But I wake before dawn to read news that arrived overnight
on a minuscule screen , and exclaim  يا لطيف every day.

Copyright © 2020 by Marilyn Hacker. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 9, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.

I loved this explanation from the poet: “I’m very fond of the ghazal form, because of its combination of unity—the qafia (rhyme) and radif (repeated word or phrase) are a ‘fixed’ element, while the couplets themselves can go off in any direction. Usually the poet includes their name, or a version of it, in the last couplet. I also love the ghazal because of other poets who practice it: Agha Shahid Ali, Zeina Hashem Beck, Mimi Khalvati, Shadab Zeest Hashmi, Suzanne Gardinier, Karthika Nair, among them. An American critic wrote, perhaps misinformed, that that last couplet was meant to include one of the ninety-nine names of God in Islam. ‘Lateef’—the kind or gentle one—is one of those names, but ‘Ya Lateef’ is a common exclamation, equivalent to ‘Good God!’ (in exasperation), or even ‘Oi veh is mir…’ Today, there is an overwhelming reason to say a collective and worldwide ‘Ya lateef,’ while the oligarchs golf in their compounds, for as long as they still can.”

Poetry Thursday, Elegy

Elegy, Surrounded by Seven Trees
~Rachel Eliza Griffiths
              for Michele Antoinette Pray-Griffiths

Ordinary days deliver joy easily
again & I can’t take it. If I could tell you
how her eyes laughed or describe
the rage of her suffering, I must
admit that lately my memories
are sometimes like a color
warping in my blue mind.
Metal abandoned in rain.

My mother will not move.

Which is to say that
sometimes the true color of
her casket jumps from my head
like something burnt down
in the genesis of a struck flame.
Which is to say that I miss
the mind I had when I had
my mother. I own what is yet.
Which means I am already
holding my own absence
in faith. I still carry a faded slip of paper
where she once wrote a word
with a pencil & crossed it out.

From tree to tree, around her grave
I have walked, & turned back
if only to remind myself
that there are some kinds of
peace, which will not be
moved. How awful to have such
wonder. The final way wonder itself
opened beneath my mother’s face
at the last moment. As if she was
a small girl kneeling in a puddle
& looking at her face for the first time,
her fingers gripping the loud,
wet rim of the universe.

Not so small victories

homage to my hips
By Lucille Clifton
these hips are big hips
they need space to
move around in.
they don't fit into little
petty places. these hips
are free hips.
they don't like to be held back.
these hips have never been enslaved,  
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips.
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top!

Lucille Clifton, “homage to my hips” from Good Woman. Copyright © 1987 by Lucille Clifton. Reprinted with the permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.
Source: Good Woman (BOA Editions Ltd., 1987)
Borrowed from Poetry Foundation

Today I mark 12 weeks of re-learning to eat healthy (and love the body I am in at any weight).

My not so small victory is that I have lost 20 lbs.

I am trying to change my relationship with food ... not just that I want to eat healthier foods. I want to use food as nourishment. I want to taste my food. I want the meals that I eat to feel satisfying.

I realized not so long ago (in relationship to my time on earth), maybe ten years ago, that I was an emotional eater. I realized it while I was on a meditation retreat. Going deep into myself caused me great anxiety, and I discovered that I tried to take refuge in food. Shoveling is what I called it.

What I didn't understand at the time was that coping with anxiety was not the only time I was compelled to shovel food.  [Subsequently I shoveled when sad, angry, grieving.]

I also did not connect shoveling with feeling deeply unsatisfied. I didn't note how I could not taste the food as I shoveled.

I thought the not tasting and not feeling satisfied had to do with how fast I eat.

I don't know if I will ever master mindful eating, especially as it pertains to slowing down the eating process.

But I can now say that after eating not just healthy but really good tasting food for the last 12 weeks (mostly thanks to my amazing housemates), I notice when I feel unsatisfied and when I don't taste the food.

It has nothing to do with what I am eating and everything to do with my emotional state.

I am getting much better at noticing my emotions; and my discomfort at having to deal with so many emotions.  Noticing the food I eat, tasting the flavor, feeling satisfied and nourished, is one way that I have accomplished this.

I am still working on how to more effectively feel my emotions. That is to say, how to allow my emotions to move through me without trying to stifle them by numbing.

I am learning to notice the desire to be satisfied and how food does not bring the salve my coping mechanism had led me to believe it would.

This not so insignificant victory of shedding unnecessary weight is a leap forward on loving myself, feeding my body and soul, and treating myself in the ways that will keep me on this road to self love.

Poetry for a Troubled Monday

you can listen to it here.  It is long but so worth it.

  

What Would Gwendolyn Brooks Do
~Parneshia Jones, 2017

Dawn oversees percolating coffee
and the new wreckage of the world.

I stand before my routine reflection,
button up my sanity,
brush weary strands of hair with pomade
and seal cracked lips of distrust
with cocoa butter and matte rouge.

I ready myself once again
for morning and mortify.
Stacking poetry and bills in a knapsack;
I bundle up hope (it’s brutal out there).

For a moment, I stand with ghosts
and the framed ancestors surrounding me.
I call out, hoping she can hear me
over the day-breaking sirens—
hoping she’s not far away,
or right down the street,
praying over another dead black boy.

How will we make it through this, Ms. Brooks?

                     Hold On.

When she held a body,
she saw much worse than this.
I know she was earshot and fingertip close to oppression.
She saw how hateful hate could be.
She raised babies, taught Stone Rangers,
grew a natural and wrote around critics.

She won a Pulitzer in the dark.

She justified our kitchenette dreams,
and held on.
She held on to all of us.

                    Hold On, she whispers. 

Another day, when I have to tip-toe
around the police and passive-aggressive emails
from people who sit only a few feet away from me.
Another day of fractured humans
who decide how I will live and die,
and I have to act like I like it
so I can keep a job;
be a team player, pay taxes on it;
I have to act like I’m happy to be
slammed, severed, and swindled.
Otherwise, I’m just part of the problem—
a rebel rouser and rude.

They want me to like it, or at least pretend,
so the pretty veils that blanket who we really are—
this complicated history, can stay pretty and veiled
like some desert belly dancer
who must be seen but not heard.

                     Hold On.

We are a world of lesions.
Human has become hindrance.
We must be stamped and have papers,
and still, it’s not enough.
Ignorance has become powerful.
The dice that rolls our futures is platinum
but hollow inside.

Did you see that, Ms. Brooks?
Do you see what we’ve become?
They are skinning our histories,
deporting our roots,
detonating our very right to tell the truth.
We are one step closer to annihilation.

                    Hold On, she says, two million light years away.

She’s right.
Hold On everybody.
Hold On because the poets are still alive—and writing.
Hold On to the last of the disappearing bees
and that Great Barrier Reef.
Hold On to the one sitting next to you,
not masked behind some keyboard.
The one right next to you.
The ones who live and love right next to you.
Hold On to them.

And when we bury another grandmother,
or another black boy;
when we stand in front of a pipeline,
pour another glass of dirty drinking water
and put it on the dining room table,
next to the kreplach, bratwurst, tamales, collards, and dumplings
that our foremothers and fathers—immigrants,
brought with them so we all knew that we came from somewhere;
somewhere that mattered.
When we kneel on the rubbled mosques,
sit in massacred prayer circles,
Holding On is what gets us through.

We must remember who we are.
We are worth fighting for.
We’ve seen beauty.
We’ve birthed babies who’ve only known a black President.
We’ve tasted empathy and paid it forward.
We’ve Go-Funded from wrong to right.
We’ve marched and made love.
We haven’t forgotten—even if they have—Karma is keeping watch. 

Hold On.
Hold On everybody.
Even if all you have left
is that middle finger around your God-given right
to be free, to be heard, to be loved,
and remembered…Hold On,
and keep
Holding.

trying...[this all over the place - you've been warned]

We yearn for connection.

But we treat each other like hostile strangers ... on the internet, and too often in real life.

So, we post and prod ... we weave and bob, we do whatever it takes to not actually connect.

Then, at times we meet our lost tribe members and connection, sometimes brief, brings us back to reality.

Life is hard, but it is not without its beauty.

Find beauty.
---
So, in the weeks that have passed since I started this post, I have had a rollercoaster of events ... and I mean that quite seriously.
I had a lovely birthday - truly amazing day with friends that included dancing - an amazing meeting about the foundation to honor Sergio's memory.  I was reminded of the blessings I have in my life, especially my wonderful, supportive community.

We celebrated Sergio's 25th birthday without him -- in the lead up, I was sure it would crush me, the energy expended just getting through the last two days made me feel like I was coming down with a cold (thankfully, I am not or it was nipped in the bud).  After rain and threats of rain and cold and people dropping out and having to reassure them that participation should only be part of your own way of dealing with this tragedy ... it was a gorgeous day.  GORGEOUS.  Ominous clouds gathered at the edges but were beat back by the sea breeze, and once again, I could feel Sergio's participation in making sure that our gathering wasn't rained on.  Friends from many parts of his life gathered, drank and ate and built a fire and an altar and laughed and cried.  While my heart was breaking again into a million pieces, it was so beautiful to see in real flesh and bone the love this person wrought with so few years.  Amazing.

I got an email offering me an interview for a job I really want.  So important on so many levels -- one, I applied for two jobs, one better paying and more in line with my skills, and one I can do with my eyes closed and enough money to live off of ... I got the interview for the better job ... amazing

My car started the steep decline which I cannot afford right now ... the sound coming from the car is a mixture of the swooped up crazy muffler sound and crazy about to fall apart -- I am generally not so moved by what others might think of me, but I want to hide every time I start my car. And for the first time in 15 years, it needs to be smog checked?! Ugh... I am torn between trying to get it sort of fixed so that I can keep it for a bit longer and donating it now to someone who will take it away... and did I mention that I love my car, I really do. It is the best car in the whole world that has been beyond a trooper for all these years ... ugh ugh ugh.

I killed it in the interview... really, killed it.  Waiting to hear back if I make it to the second round sometime in the next two weeks.

The bad thing is though that every time I have a win, I fall into the largest cavern of self doubt which is where I woke up this morning.

These are the quotes I am trying to use to get me out of my funk today:
"You are full of unshaped dreams... You are laden with beginnings ... there is hope in you." ~L. Ridge

"There is alchemy in sorrow. It can be transmuted into wisdom, which, if it does not bring joy, can yet bring happiness." ~Pearl S. Buck

Ok... it's all out there now, no more monsters under the bed. Got a stack of work to do, so I am off to be productive and wallow in self doubt no more ...

My hands are up and the wind is in my hair ... riding the rollercoaster of life.

Poetry Thursday

Love here on earth

Love beyond the grave

There are no roads

My love for you can't pave.
- T. Sachs

Poetry Thursday sort of...

The pain, their loss, 
it's all I have left of them.
You think the grief 
will make you smaller inside
like your heart will collapse 
in on itself,
but it doesn't.
I feel spaces opening up 
inside of me
like a building with rooms 
I've never explored.
~spoken by Dolores on Westworld
not sure who wrote it for the robot or the character, but I like it.