Temple of Grief
She asks me how long she’s going to feel like this,
and I don’t have the heart to tell her—
always.
I don’t have the language to make her know
the ways in which this pain is going to bloody her knees,
bring her to the brink of her own annihilation,
show her the million faces of god.
It’s too soon to talk about the transformation
that grows around wounds that don’t ever heal.
I’m hesitant to tell her there’s no blueprint—
no rules.
Just a chaos theory that invokes a sacredness
by letting oneself be choked by a monster—
that will come tidal one day,
and the next,
whisper it’s arrival like a scalpel to the jugular
while you’re driving to pick the kids up from school.
This is a kingdom of uncertainty.
Sorrow hold court.
That’s what I want to say.
We enter everything on our knees here, love.
And if we’re brave enough to keep our eyes open
while the carnage burns on frozen ground
and smoke fills our lungs,
we discover something to carry us out of the ash.
A soul, perhaps.
Water.
Maybe a poem.
This is the way prayer becomes a life, I want to say,
or a life a prayer.
Through this—
a howl that begins primal in the core earth of a being,
and erupts at no certain or definite point in the future
as feral and unbridled joy.
As deep and aching
as the chasm it was formed in. *I wrote this a couple years back, for a friend who had just lost someone she didn’t yet know how to live without. Her first significant, painful adult loss.
There was so much I wanted to tell her, but you know that’s not how it works. Grief is a shapeshifter. Untamable and sharp toothed. Different for everyone.
I feel a lot of collective grief these days from my people for all the reasons, and I guess I just wanted to remind myself, and you if I may, that while grief is a wildly painful and unpredictable force, it’s also the only wound I know of that self heals with the very thing that caused it.
Love.
It’s at the bottom of everything. Wishing you all boatloads of it. xo
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