For My Older Brother
We scored our tears in the tear of our throats.
We both asked—is anything there?
I found it slashed between love and entropy,
yours /
in the way time slits and crushes your wrists.
For My Older Brother
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ambiguity in poetry, brother elegy, contemporary poetry, emotional restraint, ethical poetics, family grief, free verse elegy, Jonathan Moya, lyric fragment, memory and healing, mental health in poetry, philosophical poem, Poem, poem about depression, poetic compression, poetic ritual, poetry, slash glyph, symbolic poetry, trauma poetry, visual poetry
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3 responses to “For My Older Brother”
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Wow, profound!
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Wow indeed! This one lands like a quiet blow to the chest. The opening image—“We scored our tears in the tear of our throats”—feels like grief that never quite made it out as sound, as if sorrow has been carved into the very place where words and cries should live. Both of you asking, “is anything there?” hints at that shared, raw question about meaning, God, or even your own hearts—what’s left after loss, after hurt, after time has had its way.
“I found it slashed between love and entropy” is such a painful, brilliant line: as if what you discovered was not neat or comforting, but torn between tenderness and decay, between wanting to hold on and watching everything fall apart. And then your brother’s answer—his “found” place—“in the way time slits and crushes your wrists” feels like a devastating image of what time and pain can do to a person’s spirit and body. The poem reads like a fragment of shared anguish between siblings—two people asking the same questions, but standing in very different outcomes. It’s stark, honest, and heartbreakingly human.
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Love the analysis.
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