a filler episode

a liminal reading

this week’s Thought (singular)

how do i know if i’m grieving correctly?

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hi

my grandfather passed away last wednesday. i’m sure i’ll have a lot to say about the feeling of grief, the believing of grief, perhaps even the community of grief eventually. today, all i’ve got for you are some poems. maybe all we’ve got in difficult times is poetry, but that’s for another issue. for now, i hope you enjoy reading these, and take the time to appreciate them and the people you love.

1. Nothing Gold Can Stay, Robert Frost

   Nature’s first green is gold,
   Her hardest hue to hold.
   Her early leaf’s a flower; 
   But only so an hour.
   Then leaf subsides to leaf,
   So Eden sank to grief,
   So dawn goes down to day
   Nothing gold can stay.
   

2. In Blackwater Woods, Mary Oliver

   To live in this world
   you must be able
   to do three things:
   to love what is mortal;
   to hold it
   against your bones knowing
   your own life depends on it;
   and, when the time comes to let it go,
   to let it go.
   

3. Everything is Exactly the Same as it Was the Day Before, Ina Cariño

   I feel it all in my chest—
   a drumming,
   a warning, a spell.
   
   back in the yard, granny doles out rice
   & meat, pineapple liquor, glass bottles
   of Sprite. but I am snoring by midnight,
   my sisters & I still swathed in red chiffon.
   
   by morning, I cry because I missed it.
   I cry because they say I’m not alone.
   I cry because home is a warning,
   its pulse a whiff of flint in the dark.
   

4. Description of Symptoms, Allison Benis White

   How a ribbon curls when pulled 
   across a scissor’s blade, I am practicing 
   transformation, pain. How the dark hair
   of imagination, uncut, grows down
   to the floor. What is left 
   but to make a world, a war?                                
                                                                                        
   *
   
   Or a landscape in which to stay alive
   (ghost flower/house of breath). Another wish: language
   drilled through ice, through my life. 
   If grief is love with nowhere to go, this is
   my mouth turning into snow.
   This is somewhere.
   

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thank you for reading, and see you next week <3