Archives for posts with tag: Grief

Waiting by Smitha Vishwanath (I AM STILL WAITING Series)

July 13, 2021 //

blue-woman-1955
Waiting
by Smitha Vishwanath

I waited for a call
My alkaline blood curdling
The pungency burning my insides
I tasted harshness on my tongue
And bitterness in my skin
I was a wisp of a child waiting—

I waited as a prisoner waits
For a glimpse of the open sky
To feel the sun’s rays on tired bones
Hungry for a bowl of kindness—
from those who had beheld
my mother’s generosity and been graced with fleeting time.

I became a miner—
Trapped—
at the bottom of a shaft
the heat of waiting—
turned the liquid iron in my heart
into steel

I waited no longer
Or maybe it had become a part of me—the waiting
Like my aching
Feet—I could walk
I could run, I could jump; I did not miss
Or crave for painless soles

Then I lost my father
And a shooting pain rattled every bone in my body
And pricked every pore in my skin
They say fresh wounds heal quickly
It’s the old wounds that are the worst
If they flare up again

I became a wisp of a child
I became a prisoner
I became a miner
Waiting—
I am still waiting
Is that so bad?

PAINTING: Blue Woman by Eugene Leroy (1955).

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: The pain of losing my mother in 2006 had dulled over time only to resurface now with the loss of my father. I remember feeling lost at sea then and I feel the same now. It is the pain of losing someone and being left alone to climb back up again that led to this poem.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Smitha Vishwanath is a banker by profession, a blogger by choice, a poet by accident and an artist at heart. She published her first book of poetry Roads: A Journey with Verses in July 2019. Her poetry has been published by Rebelle Society, Silver Birch Press, and SpillWords Press. Her poem “Do you have dreams?’” was recently featured on the National Poetry Writing Month 2021 website. Visit Smitha on her website.

Tags Art, Grief, Poems, poetry, poets

Categories I AM STILL WAITING

Poem Incorporating a Line from Ha Jin by Barbara Crary (I AM STILL WAITING Series)

April 26, 2021 //

hawk-1946
Poem Incorporating a Line from Ha Jin
by Barbara Crary

And I am still waiting for grief
to overwhelm me or perhaps
to disappear like the gray mass
of snow on our neighbor’s side-
walk, snow in the pine tree’s shade,
no longer fresh and white.

The red-tail sits on the barren branch
he favored last year and the year
before when he screeched for hours
seeking a mate who would brood
on the nest for weeks, waiting
for their hatchlings to appear.

Red-tails watch over their young,
until the fledglings learn to soar,
despite their inept first attempts.
In a week or two, they depart for good.
After all her vigilance, does the she-
hawk stay to mourn the empty nest?

As I sit and watch the hawk, I think of
pandemic’s early days when we planned
a hundred things to do — there were,
heaven help us, lists on the internet —
no, I did not learn calligraphy or how to
juggle, not exactly anyway. But

I have learned to be still, to watch and to wait
for whatever grief comes my way next —
a slow growing cancer caught too late;
the stillbirth of a much-wanted baby girl;
a sudden suicide (the rowboat empty
on the half frozen lake).

Sometimes I remember that we used to
like talking about grief when it was a
hypothetical, a distant abstraction and not
the ache of emptiness, an unseen clump of
wayward cells, or a barren branch
where a nest used to be.

PAINTING: Hawk by Xu Beihong (1946).

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: As I was thinking of how to respond to this prompt, I came across a poem by Ha Jin, “Ways of Talking.” The first line, “We used to like talking about grief,” really resonated with me. I couldn’t stop thinking about it and kept incorporating it again and again into my poetry practice. I decided to use it here because I know I am still waiting for that full weight of pandemic-related grief to appear whether I choose to talk about it or not.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Barbara Crary worked for thirty years as a school psychologist in southeastern Pennsylvania and began writing poetry after her retirement. She has participated in writing courses through the University of Iowa International Writing Program and was a contributing poet to Whitmanthology: On Loss and Grief, as well as to Silver Birch Press. She especially enjoys writing found poetry and participated in thepoeming during April 2021, using Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs as a source text.

Tags birds, Grief, Poems, poetry, poets

Categories I AM STILL WAITING

Bones and Shadows, poem by John Philip Johnson

February 25, 2014 //

BONES AND SHADOWS
by John Philip Johnson

She kept its bones in a glass case
next to the recliner in the living room,
and sometimes thought she heard
him mewing, like a faint background music;
but if she stopped to listen, it disappeared.
Likewise with a nuzzling around her calves,
she’d reach absent-mindedly to scratch him,
but her fingers found nothing but air.
One day, in the corner of her eye,
slinking by the sofa, there was a shadow.
She glanced over, expecting it to vanish.
But this time it remained.
She looked at it full on. She watched it move.
Low and angular, not quite as catlike
as one might suppose, but still, it was him.
She walked to the door, just like in the old days,
and opened it, and met a whoosh of winter air.
She waited. The bones in the glass case rattled.
Then the cat-shadow darted at her,
through her legs, and slipped outside.
It mingled with the shadows of bare branches,
and leapt at the shadow of a bird.
She looked at the tree, but there was no bird.
Then he blended into the shadow of a bush.
She stood in the threshold, her hands on the door,
the sharp breeze ruffling the faded flowers
of her house dress, and she could feel
her own bones rattling in her body,
her own shadow trying to slip out.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: John Philip Johnson has published poems in Rattle, Southern Poetry Review, Euphony, Ruminate, Chicago Quarterly Review, and other literary journals. He lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, with his wife and five children. In college, he took up poetry after reading Byron, in “Don Juan”, rhyme “nunnery” with “gunnery” and thought anybody can do this. Visit the poet at johnphilipjohnson.com.