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
loss
Wounded
“No mourning can heal the wound of neverness.”
—Dr. Idel Dreimer, lumpenbangenpiano.com
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.
Transform
Loss — the great redefiner of life.
Immeasurable
Even hundredfold grief is divisible by love.
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.
Torch
Grief is a fire
set to the heart —
burning some things away
keeping others aflame
Symbiotic
Death is not warden of life, not thief, nor enemy — but Life’s most equal partner.
Are you – Nowhere – too?
In grief, one is so lost. Grieving is pacing back and forth between past and present — and a feeling of no longer belonging to either place. A feeling of no longer belonging anywhere — because the heart is the map, and with the map suddenly rewritten, one is so lost.
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