Stay.
Here.
In this place where longing wants to build a nest
and missing is a music that pulls you, porous, to each night.
Here between memory and the fear of disappearance,
the friction of what was and is and all you cannot see.
Stay.
With the unlit room. The mountain,
your feet at the bottom. Your tears,
enough to relinquish the river’s drought.
Stay.
In this underworld.
Here, in the wound, the widening crack,
the story you need to tell
again and again and again.
Fall into the layers.
Stay open.
Stay.
Let all be turbulent.
Tender.
Compost.
The way through all this grief.
One of the first “support groups” I signed up for after my dad died was a poetry series offered at a local center for the literary arts founded by a poet, Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno, whose daughter had been murdered (Bonanno later died of cancer). In Kathy’s workshop, I found a place to rest in my grief, to drop into its layers and open to what wanted to speak — love and yearning; memory, sometimes bewildering, sometimes angry, sometimes made up; and so many tears taking shape on a page. Since then, poetry, as I expressed in my good friend Oceana Sawyer’s book, “Life, Death, Grief, and the Possibility of Pleasure,” has been a constant companion to my grief, whether I’m writing it, reading it or sharing it.
So, I hope you don’t mind that every now and then there will be poems here. I could say some things about the above. I could offer a prompt or two to help you find your way through the poem (which I do when I read the works of others in my Writing Wednesday feature on Instagram). But I invite you to simply be with it, maybe read it out loud and see what catches on the tongue, shivers in the breast, lands in the chest or belly. Do this with any poem. Listen for the truth, your truth, that wants to met and held.
Upcoming Spaces for Grief Support
You don’t have to be a poet or even love poetry to attend this circle. Learn more and register here.
Held at a beautiful wellness center nestled in the woods in Rittenhouse Town, Philadelphia, this physical space invites nourishment from the moment you walk in the door. Sign up here to join me.