So I've been writing little poems from grief, not just
because of the loss of my dad, but before
that, I was grieving about the Earth, grieving about nature,
grieving about divorce--
my friend's divorce, family divorces.
And just loss.
And it seemed weirdly pure to do it, just as an act,
and to write poems about it.
I found this great quote by Judith Butler
that I'm going to read.
She's a wonderful writer.
And I'm going to use it as an epigraph
to this little section.
So I'm going to read two of these little grief poems,
and then a few poems from a sequence,
"The Forests of Grief and Color."
"Perhaps grief is imagined to end in violence,
as if grief itself could be killed.
Can we, perhaps, find one of the sources of nonviolence
in the capacity to grieve, to stay with the unbearable loss
without converting it into destruction?
If we could bear our grief, would we
be less inclined to strike back, or to strike back, or to strike
out?
And if the grief is unbearable, is there
another way to live with it that is not the same as bearing it?"
That's from her essay called "On Grief and Rage."
It was in the Penn Magazine.
I really loved that essay.
"The Forests of Grief and Color."
Listening, past the hazel bank, your changed life
lies under, prior to purr.
New species grow cold spores, inside casings strewn.
Groups and nations howl, unseen.
The mind God-labors pumping itself green.
It's then your true eye gathers its half loves.
Pollen floats upstream in doubt, in the shadow of a drought.
Put your phone down.
You're just about out of opposites.
Oh, dark evening, sink.
In brief woods, there's lignan at work.
Past profit, such comfort to decay.
Wood mind would, so small to say, apart, fled.
Hold in hope, not out--
not to go out among them, yet.
To have important work among the dead.