What is it about grief that strips you down
and comforts you at the same time,
leaves you naked in the dark
yet fed with divine morsels.
You want to gather and depart--
convene a love tribunal then run
to the nearest table and climb underneath,
wrapping the edges of your sweater
tight against itself.
Grief is digging down, further than you can feel
while gasping for breath, reaching for daylight,
hoping for a sign of life--a butterfly,
a window, a cormorant on the waves.
I once felt grief so terrible that my body
fell face forward, knees curled under me on the
hard industrial carpet of the church. My heart
wished it could descend through the nasty synthetic
flooring--slip through the foundation,
descend into dirt, be covered and protected by dirt.
But that is the grief of abandonment.
What of loss. The loss of a love that has never hurt you.
How do we heal that ache, that pure pain.
We can never feign joy. We wade into the lake where
grief is shimmering on the surface and
sorrow is the bitterly-cold at our feet. We hesitate.
We swim. We endure. We hope.
We return to the earth drenched.
We are dried by the sun's heat.
We walk forward,
ahead,
without despair,
and look back to see the cormorant
plunging the waters for fish.
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