Grief Graffiti

When I was a child I loved poetry. I read every book of poems I could get my hands on & also wrote my own. I have several notebooks filled with poems, long & short, on a variety of topics. Somehow I lost that as I got older and stopped reading poetry. Now, in my grief, I have found myself drawn to it again, finding it comforting & healing. Maybe it’s that feeling of “home” for me, since it was such a part of my childhood. One of my faves recently is Kristina Mahr who writes about loss & grief & love. I think I’ve shared a few of her short poems here already, but here’s another one that especially resonated with me today:

Some moments grief has me stomping around and slamming cabinets and spoiling for a fight with the world. I want to say, “it’s not fair,” but I’m in that place where words that I want to come out mad come out sad instead, so I don’t say them. Every feeling is so close to the surface, it takes absolutely no reach to touch them, and anyway, they touch me more than I touch them. The walls of grief are so close I brush against them even when I’m trying not to. I am grateful, as I ever am, that poetry is allowing me to sort through some of it. And what poetry isn’t helping, empathy from others is. And what neither of those are helping, I’m told time will. I just wish I knew how much.