Grief bores holes
in our hearts & heads
like a woodpecker
— peck peck peck
— knock knock knock
You can’t make it stop
Eventually it flies away
— but leaves pits
that never fully heal
death
At any time
we are every moment of life
living in crosshairs of death
End of life
no matter which end-of-life decisions were made,
there are always regrets, there is always that guilt —
live parts of me holding onto memories of a dying you
dead parts of me holding onto living memories of you
Middle
A headstone is just a bookmark in our unfinished lives.
Cold is relative
When you’re shivering with loss, let love keep you warm with memories.
A lesson
Death teaches us meaning
of the word sudden —
one minute there, one minute
not —
the blackness, the blankness,
the emptiness, the silence, the void —
the most palpable, oppressing nothing
there ever was.
Forty-two-tick-tock
the body is a clock —
bones tick and tock
years gather in flesh
an alarm set for death
Do I write grief or is it writing me?
I write all these death poems, these grief poems —
and does it really make me feel better? Or am I just
twisting my heart so that I can feel, to remember?
Because I’m afraid that if I don’t feel, I will forget.
Symbiotic
Death is not warden of life, not thief, nor enemy — but Life’s most equal partner.
Threads
Life is woven of love and death, aches and smiles, persistence and letting go.
Leavings
silently but for the rustle of wings
swooping death flies off with its prey —
a feather drifts down from the empty sky
for left-behind hearts to remember by
Stone-faced
Wailing, bearing flowers
and collapsing to her knees,
her hot tears fall upon me—
But I remain unmoved,
stone-faced, above it all—
her face etched with grief
and mine with the years,
weathered with past life—
Gently she touches my face
and presents me the flowers—
I’ve seen her cry many times
but it is in my nature to be
rough and cold, grounded
in reality I know nothing else—
Still she keeps coming back to me
and though I cannot give her love
I will always guard hers.
How fares it?
Thigh-bone said to breast-bone:
“How fares it, dead,
now heart’s soft hammer
is silencèd?
How fares it, brother,
when the only sound
is slow roots thrusting
into the ground?”
Breast-bone said to thigh-bone:
“How fares it, friend,
with no errands to run,
no knee to bend?
How fares it ghost, now
the only stir
is of quiet becoming
quieter?”
Thigh-bone and breast-bone
said to skull:
“What of dead Plato
and the Greek trull?
How fares it, emblem
of death, set free
from wisdom and lust’s
infirmity?”…
—Humbert Wolfe (1885–1940), from “A Conversation,” 1932