Tag: grief poetry
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Mourning Mom
This poem emerged from a moment of speculative grief—imagining my mother’s aging voice as a thread I never got to follow. I wanted to write an elegy that refused sentimentality, that honored absence without ornament. The poem’s structure mirrors that ethic: short stanzas, pared-back language, and a final line that lands without flourish.
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Manual for grieving a house blowing away…
Manual for Grieving a House Blowing Away…” emerged from a moment of quiet devastation—watching my home unravel not in fire or flood, but in the slow erosion of memory and ritual. I wrote it as a guide for what cannot be saved, and what must. The poem resists sentimentality and instead offers a liturgy of…
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Someone Passes at 8 a.m. and the Birds Do Not Sing
This poem began as a refusal. I wanted to interrogate the cultural impulse to romanticize death—to project meaning onto birdsong, rain, and sunlight in the wake of loss. The poem dismantles these gestures, exposing how metaphor often obscures rather than reveals. It’s not an elegy. It’s a critique of elegy. The theme is not grief…
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I Will Not Go to the Light Having Known Nothing of the Darkness
I wanted to write a poem that metabolized silence, that honored the gestures we inherit but never name. The title came first—a vow not to bypass darkness in pursuit of light. From there, each stanza became a vessel: bruised fruit, a crocheted blanket, a drawer that won’t close. I wrote it to preserve what frays.
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A Peach Seed Thrown Away
A Peach Seed Thrown AwayIt was late spring—the kind of daythat wears winter’s breath.I was seventeen,waiting for the 6:42 a.m. trainto take meto my college interview.I wasn’t sureI wanted to go.The station was mostly empty—just the usual commuters,coffee cups steaming—small altars of routine.He stood near the vending machine,maybe a few years older,maybe not.He wore a…