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So I've been writing little
poems from grief, not just

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because of the loss
of my dad, but before

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that, I was grieving about the
Earth, grieving about nature,

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grieving about divorce--

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my friend's divorce,
family divorces.

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And just loss.

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And it seemed weirdly pure
to do it, just as an act,

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and to write poems about it.

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I found this great
quote by Judith Butler

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that I'm going to read.

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She's a wonderful writer.

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And I'm going to use
it as an epigraph

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to this little section.

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So I'm going to read two of
these little grief poems,

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and then a few poems
from a sequence,

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"The Forests of
Grief and Color."

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"Perhaps grief is imagined
to end in violence,

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as if grief itself
could be killed.

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Can we, perhaps, find one of
the sources of nonviolence

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in the capacity to grieve, to
stay with the unbearable loss

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without converting
it into destruction?

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If we could bear
our grief, would we

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be less inclined to strike back,
or to strike back, or to strike

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out?

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And if the grief is
unbearable, is there

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another way to live with it that
is not the same as bearing it?"

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That's from her essay
called "On Grief and Rage."

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It was in the Penn Magazine.

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I really loved that essay.

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"The Forests of
Grief and Color."

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Listening, past the hazel
bank, your changed life

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lies under, prior to purr.

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New species grow cold spores,
inside casings strewn.

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Groups and nations howl, unseen.

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The mind God-labors
pumping itself green.

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It's then your true eye
gathers its half loves.

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Pollen floats upstream in doubt,
in the shadow of a drought.

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Put your phone down.

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You're just about
out of opposites.

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Oh, dark evening, sink.

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In brief woods,
there's lignan at work.

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Past profit, such
comfort to decay.

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Wood mind would, so small
to say, apart, fled.

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Hold in hope, not out--

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not to go out among them, yet.

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To have important
work among the dead.

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