As we continue through our time,
We learn to make friends with difficult loss.
Grief and mourning accompany us,
Like mist and fog on a gray autumn day.
Yet even in the bleakest moments,
We can remember fragments of joy.
Let us pause to reflect on the wonder of clouds,
The fall of rain, and the wind moving through the trees.
Thus we live with the ache of memories,
Letting their beauty and sorrow scatter like drifting leaves.
We love you always.
Let us gather chrysanthemums
For mourning in these perilous times.
Weave them into crowns of sorrow
For grief at lives taken in brutal war.
Scatter their petals on the wind
For sympathy with those who remain.
These are but the slightest gestures,
Tiny funereal floral tributes.
Do more where we can.
You still live on.
Not in some celestial hall,
Separate from those you left behind,
And watching them go about their lives.
No, you remain present
In the stories we tell of you,
Among those who knew and loved you.
And you will reach strangers even yet,
As these are shared,
And people see your name to ask,
Who was this?
While we are here to remember and tell
And all those who come after us who have heard,
You will live.
I see you now,
Your face turned away from me
And hidden in shadow.
You will be everywhere
As I move through this changed life,
The one I used to live with you.
The birds you rescued have fledged and flown the nest.
I am slowly getting the house organized.
When I go out, people ask where you’ve been.
Sometimes I still can’t bring myself to answer.
This grief is yet very raw.
I will survive, but I miss you so.
This grief twists around me,
A primordial root connected to the fundamental wailing
Pulled from the the soul of the earth.
My tears are the salt of the sea and the stream of the rain;
They are water itself and life-
Bitter and burning and flow.
I scream so loud it swallows the universe.
My laments echo down time’s corridors
Like fell black-winged horses running a doomed apocalyptic race.
My words are forever etched on the very pillars of creation itself.
I am done.