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Posts Tagged ‘death’

What the Silence Said

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on December 11, 2022| 4 Comments »



What did you want to hear
when you knelt at his grave?

After you spilled your own words
into the afternoon shade,
what did you think you might hear
when you listened?  

By now you know the gift of listening
is greater than the gift of sound.
By now you don’t expect his voice.
You know my voice by heart.

I am not the sound of loss,
but the sound of infinite presence,
which touches equally
the living and the dead.

And I am what holds you as you speak.
I hold you as you say nothing at all.
In your listening, you join me
in the most intimate of conversations.

You rise. Together, we walk to the gate
then through the gate,
and long after you’ve left the grave,
I am with you.

In fact, I am the one thing
that will never leave you.

*

How do we fall in love the world, even when it feels difficult? In this 20-minute poetry reading, I explore this in poetry, followed by a brief conversation and Q & R. Hosted by the wonderful Larry Robinson. If you want info about more monthly poetry readings, AND/OR if you want to be a part of Larry Robinson’s daily poetry list (sharing the poems of others) you can write him and ask to be included at Lrobpoet@sonic.net

Poems from the reading:
Becoming
Cruciferous
The Letter I Never Wrote to Pablo Neruda
Making Breakfast with Dolly
No Slam Dunk, But
Though I Knew Love Before
It Comes Down to This
For the Living
Bioluminescence
You Darkness by Rainer Maria Rilke, tr. Robert Bly

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Leonids

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on November 30, 2022| 4 Comments »




Since you died, every shooting star is you.
Not a sign, exactly, more like a reminder
you came into my life brilliant and brief.
More like a reminder to say your name out loud.
As if I don’t already say your name out loud
at least a dozen times a day.

Tonight while walking in the cold
I saw two shooting stars,
and it reminded me of a warmer night
when you and your sister and I
stretched our bodies side by side
on the cool pavement and stared up at the sky
hoping for meteors.

Did we see any? I don’t recall.
I only remember how happy I was then.
A small bit of that happiness
reaches through the loss.
It takes me by the hand,
walks with me through the dark.

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The Mother Stands in the Doorway

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on November 28, 2022| 12 Comments »

Because you are gone,
I will never again stand
in your doorway and listen
to the sound of your breath
as you sleep.
I can remember the way
it used to calm me—
the slow, even rhythm
that proved you were alive.
I used to laugh at myself.
As if you wouldn’t be alive.
How farfetched it felt,
the idea of your death.
Now, I hear the absence
of your breath everywhere—
everywhere is a doorway
where I find you are not.
And so I listen.

Sometimes it seems as if a silence
is breathing me,
and somehow, you live in that silence.
I don’t know how it works.
I only know that since you are gone,
sometimes listening feels like communion.
Sometimes when I am very quiet,
when there is no sound at all,
I hear you say nothing.
It’s everything.

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A New Kind of Conversation

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on August 23, 2022| 2 Comments »


It is possible to be with someone who is gone.
—Linda Gregg, “The Presence in Absence”


I have no phone receiver to connect me to the other side,
but every day I speak to my beloveds through candle flame.
Every night, I speak to them through the dark before sleep.
I speak to them in the car when I am alone.
I speak to them when I walk beneath stars,
when I walk in the woods, when I walk in the rain.
It is possible to be with someone who is gone.
It is possible to feel what cannot be seen,
to sense what cannot be heard,
to be held by what cannot be touched.
It is possible for love to grow after death.
If there is a secret, it is, perhaps, openness.
The way air lets light move through.
The way a window invites in the scent of grass.
The way sand receives the ocean,
then, rearranged, lets it pass.


This poem was published in ONE ART: A Journal of Poetry on 9/11/22

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Relative Key

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on August 15, 2022| 9 Comments »


 
 
I paid extra for the bell
with a beautiful sound,
knowing we would ring it
one hundred and eight times
on the anniversary of your death.
I wanted it to be beautiful.
I wanted to play a sound
that would reach
to wherever you are
and offer you peace.
There are bells that ring
danger or failure or shame,
bells that clang with dissonance,
bells that toll only melancholy.
I have heard those bells.
But for you, my boy,
the bell we rang for you
pealed with a brilliant, shining ring,
a rousing chiming,
a surprising harmony
that opened the evening
with new light,
a ringing that rhymed
with new colors I’ve found in my heart—
the shimmering blue of enduring hope,
the glimmering gold of companioning.
I could still hear the blue
and the resonant gold
long after the bell stopped ringing.
 

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The Unheard

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on July 27, 2022| 6 Comments »




I do not hear his shrieks of laughter
escaping from his room.
I don’t hear his hand beating time against the table.
I don’t hear the luff of his breath
as I stand beside him while he sleeps.
I don’t hear the fear in his voice
when he begs me, please mom, please.

I hear the rain on the rooftop,
a morse code of love I don’t know how to translate
except in shades of green.
I hear cars on the highway,
and remember life is moving.
I hear the whir of the hummingbird wings
and the black notes of crows
and the silence where the boy
no longer grows.

If you ask me do I hear his voice,
I would tell you no.
But that is only partly true.
I do not hear his voice in words.
I don’t hear it the way perhaps I wish to.
But I hear him inside me, not a whisper,
but a voice that sounds startlingly like my own,
a voice that sounds like rain on the roof,
like cars on the highway, like hummingbird wings,
like crows, like the silence
where my love for the boy still grows.

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Before the Burial

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on June 14, 2022| 13 Comments »


Because I can, I carry the box with your ashes
around the house as if you’re a baby on my hip.
I point out things and explain them,
just as I did when you were young and alive.
There, I say, there is where you practiced piano.
Here, I say, is where you sat at the counter
and wept when I told you the story
of Cinderella. And here is the wall
where we hung all your artwork.
And here is the room where you slept.
Here’s the plant you gave me last year—
see how it’s doubled in size?
And here’s the new couch in the place
where the old couch once was,
the one on which we snuggled each morning
before school. I walk the floor as I did
when you were young and fussy and needed
touch and movement to calm you.
Now I am the one who is calmed by the walking.
So familiar, these steps around the kitchen island,
these steps around the table.
So familiar, this weight on my hip.
Soon we will place this small wooden box
in the ground, so while I still can, I carry you.
Oh sweetheart, how is it I’m thriving amidst this gravity?
It is, I am sure, because I, too, am deeply companioned,
carried from moment to moment, from space to space.
And though I don’t hear it, there is perhaps a voice
that says to me, Here is where you lit
a candle every day. Here is where you practiced
to love in new ways. And here is where
you did not judge yourself as you wept.
Here is the place where you did nothing but breathe.
And here is where you thought of all the people
who have carried you.
And here is where you said thank you.

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Gestation

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on June 8, 2022| 18 Comments »

The day you died, I remember thinking
how much it felt like your birth.
All the blood. The way they swaddled
your body in white. How I sang to you
the same song I sang on your first day:
a howl of pain,
then a chant that called on the pure light
within you to guide your way on.
Most of all, I remember thinking
I didn’t know how to live in this altered world—
the only way to learn was by doing.
Just as a new mother learns minute by minute
how to nurse, to comfort, to sleep,
how to change her life to meet the new child,
so this old mother learned minute by minute
to let go, to grieve, to breathe, to sleep,
how to change my life to meet a day without you.
It’s been forty-one weeks since you died.
It takes forty weeks to form a child.
It feels as if I’ve been pregnant
with the loss of you. So embodied.
So aware of great change. Is it strange
to feel I’ve been birthed by your death?
Just like when you were born, I’ve been
transformed by an overwhelming love.
It is not at all the same. It’s the same.
I am no longer the woman I was.

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For the Living

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on June 5, 2022| 10 Comments »

It is the work of the living
to grieve the dead. 
It is our work to wake each day, 
to live into the world that is. 
It is our work to weep,
and it is our work to be healed. 
Some part of us knows 
not only the absence of our beloveds, 
but also their presence,
how they continue to teach us, 
how they invite us to grow. 
It is our work to be softened by loss, 
to be undone, destroyed, remade.
Wounded, we recoil, 
and it is our work to notice how,
like crushed and trampled grass, 
we spring back. 
It is our work to meet death again
and again and again, 
and though it aches to be open, 
it is our work to be opened, 
to live into the opening
until we know ourselves
as blossoms nourished from within
by the radiance of the ones 
who are no longer physically here.
They have given us their love light to carry. 
It is our work to be in service to that light. 

from All the Honey (Samara Press, 2023)

italicized line is paraphrased from Wendy Videlock

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Cancelling the Membership

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on May 18, 2022| 11 Comments »




What is the reason
you’re canceling his membership?
asked the AAA representative.
Because he’s dead,
I said, my voice flat
as the stiff plastic card
with my son’s name on it.
I’m so sorry,
said the woman.
Thank you, I said,
determined to stay composed.
But I found myself at a threshold
with one foot in the past
when my son had just learned
to drive and was proud
to be a safe driver,
and one foot in the present
reciting the numbers
of my credit card
to pay for the membership
that no longer includes him.
Around the fifth number,
grief was a lug wrench
lodged in my throat
and I could not speak
through my tears.
I’m sorry, I said.
Take your time, she said.
It took me three tries
to get through the digits.
The number had become his smile
as he polished the headlamps.
The number had become his pride
in driving me to the store.
It was his hands on the wheel,
his glee in the curves, his finger
tapping the dash in time
to a cheeky country song.
How is it a memory so beautiful
can crumple me like a fender
hit by a semi at the same time
it floods me with joy?
God, he was happy
when he was driving,
his foot on the accelerator,
and all that road waiting
to be explored.

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