Every now and then, grief rises up out of nowhere and swallows you, when it’s been lying dormant for a long time. It’s hard to describe this feeling, and especially hard to describe it to the person you’ve chosen to spend your life with, when they know you so well, but never knew the person who was taken from you. To them the person you're grieving has always been a ghost. In my case, the person I was grieving had brought me into the world and raised me from a soft-skulled, frightened and expectant little creature into ‘someone’. Someone with thoughts and hopes and opinions, tastes and dispositions, qualities and flaws. The person that I am, that he loves, is largely the creation of someone I can only know through fragmented memories and hazy ideas, someone he will never know at all. So, I wrote this poem in one of those times, when grief leapt out of the shadows, ambushed me unsuspecting and unprepared, and I needed to put into words what was happening, to help someone understand something I couldn't quite make sense of myself.
I wrote it one night at about 2am, after I'd stared at the ceiling of my mind for hours and finally accepted that sleep was not coming to relieve me. This is when I wrote most things for a long time, especially things about mum, especially things that were too heavy and sad to think about in the daytime. So it turned out a bit Emo. But I guess that’s fairly apt for a poem about grief.
Of course, the poem is written to her, not him. That’s just how it ‘came out’, as everything ever does: as a conversation with her absence.
Conversations with emptiness
They asked me to write you a letter
But my hands were stiff
They couldn’t move the pen
Words stuck before they formed
Your death was a silent promise
That I could hear
But not respond to
When you closed the door, words flowed
Ink but not sound
I danced with grief in the silence
Then it wrapped around my body like sandpaper
I fought and scrambled through
It smoothened my edges.
When I hear myself describe grief, my words are hollow
Abstracted from myself
My grief is ‘a story’
Un-teasing knots to weave a picture
But memories and hurt are so unclear
How can I put feelings into words without rhetoric?
They steal what is hazy, ineffable, conflicted, to narrate a fairy tale
A nightmare. But it is not mine.
To him you are a phantom
To me you are a spectre
You sit behind it all
Months go by and I don’t allow your absence to take hold of me
Like I held your body
Like you held back Your embrace faint. Feeble. Giving up.
So long you have not been present in my life that you are present in absence
In the emptiness – you are there
Surrounding this body you shaped like playdough
With your gentle, loving hands
Drunken, clumsy hands
With brittle bones
And thick veins
And strong intentions
Both fickle and indignant.
You are not just in my crooked nose and cheekbones
My eyes, my face
But the eyes through which I see
Through which the world filters in
Shards of light, rearranged into something coherent
But which I don’t understand
So beautiful. And so unsure.
You do not own my writing
My thoughts
My love
You do not get to seep in at the corners
When I have scrubbed you from my life
Scrubbed till my arms ached
And the skin of my fingers was raw
Please stay lying implicit in the beauty
Allow me to breathe
My lungs working in reciprocity with emptiness
And I will allow you to live in my bones
You can rest in me
If you rest soundlessly
And let me dance with life
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