We've all been forced to face the question of mortality in one way or another (as I wrote about in July). Now, after 1 million deaths worldwide, it's almost certain we've each grappled with it at some point in the last 6 months. But that's not the same thing as grieving an actual loss.
There is something sharp and breathless about the feeling that comes with the death of someone you knew, loved, or respected. For many of you, that gut-punch arrived on Friday night, upon hearing of the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. For others, it may have happened over the last several weeks or months -- the loss of a loved one to COVID-19. For others still, it happened long ago. But the feeling lingers.
There are many ways to hold grief. Maybe you press it down deep within you. Maybe you carry it openly in your arms. Maybe you keep it in the place between, caught in your throat. Regardless of how you hold grief, once you've felt it, it is inexplicably a part of you. And so is the person you lost. Your future is an opportunity to let that person live on, because some part of them made you who you are today. When the grief endures, remind yourself of that. Then let it carry you through.
This week, poems about grief after loss.
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Making a Fist
by Naomi Shihab Nye
We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.
—Jorge Luis Borges
For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.
“How do you know if you are going to die?”
I begged my mother.
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,
“When you can no longer make a fist.”
Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with our unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand.
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In Blackwater Woods
by Mary Oliver
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it
go,
to let it go.
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Separation
by W.S. Merwin
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
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Elegy
by Aracelis Girmay
What to do with this knowledge that our living is not guaranteed?
Perhaps one day you touch the young branch
of something beautiful. & it grows & grows
despite your birthdays & the death certificate,
& it one day shades the heads of something beautiful
or makes itself useful to the nest. Walk out
of your house, then, believing in this.
Nothing else matters.
All above us is the touching
of strangers & parrots,
some of them human,
some of them not human.
Listen to me. I am telling you
a true thing. This is the only kingdom.
The kingdom of touching;
the touches of the disappearing, things.
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Are you looking for poems that fit a specific topic or feeling? Reply to this email with whatever that topic area is, and I'll cover your topic (and suggest some poems that fit!) in an upcoming edition of Sunday Poems.
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