The Healing Power of Poetry
And should your memory escape through rock and earth
We'd hold on as it tumbled, mole ruit sua,
Beneath its own weight.
Still another poem about the object of my preoccupation, The Presence of Your Absence, by Doug Tanoury, imagines the loss of a person and the ensuing emptiness following him like a loyal dog, unwilling/to leave me unattended. In Tanoury's poem death is not defined; the reader may theorize that perhaps the person simply left. No matter. The death of a relationship is a kind of death.
All these poems comforted me, and gradually an idea began to form. I knew then that I must write about my friend, that the anguish and horror had to be vented. If I continued as I was, nothing but misery would come of it. I considered many of the great poets who'd written about the loss of a loved one. W. H. Auden's FuneralBlues remains one of the most poignant statements ever written about the pain of loss. The poem can be understood by anyone, and made the work of this genius at least reachable by those whose tastes would not normally allow them to seek out an academic poet. Robert Hayden's poem, Those Winter Sundays relates the sadness this Baha'i poet experiences over the lack of appreciation he showed his father. I marveled at the beauty of such poetry, beauty the world might not have known had it not been for the sharing of feelings about death.
Consequences of Depression
My friend had long suffered from depression, the kind that will not allow you to leave the house some days. In the end, there was very little beauty in his life, very little of anything for him to hold on to. And so, in my own grief, I set out to create beauty from his pain, to create something for me to hold on to. I wrote a poem for my friend. He will be sorely missed.
Damned
The roses you adored run
wild and yellow and stupid. I tell myself
no way you'll go to hell. Pointless
for the Lord to send you twice.
Joy and sorrow twisted like green vines
clutching their host in a grip
that defies mortar. None of us
knew where your mind began or rested,
the jumps were what counted.
Today is hot and steamy,
gray like your ashes scattered
Latest Articles