We could all use a bit more of that nowadays.
She has a wry sense of humor and writes particularly beautifully about grief.
That last line “I know.
Credit: Getty Images
But I do not approve.
And I am not resigned.”
is what gives me solace.
Nelson Fitch; John Joseph Adams/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Loss and difficulty and grief are facts of life.
But we don’t have to like it.
We don’t have to surrender.
Ray Kachatorian; Abrams Image
Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
Tai Power Seeff; Crown
The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,
They are gone.
They are gone to feed the roses.
Elegant and curled
Is the blossom.
Nina Subin; Knopf
Fragrant is the blossom.
But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.
Jessica Keaveny; Catapult
But I do not approve.
And I am not resigned.
My husband said to me, How can you be lost, when youre the lighthouse of the family?
Sylvie Rosokoff; Avid Reader Press / Simon and Schuster
I wrote this as a reminder to myself and a love letter to all mothers.
A mother is a lighthouse
And there are rocks everywhere.
She will guide you the best way she knows how.
A mother is there when you need light
And will throw it in your direction.
The mother stands as tall as she can
Through the fog.
If he were promising that life was beautiful, I would have to hit him.
But he is not saying that, he is saying something so much smaller and yet so miraculous.
See the long shadow that is cast by the tree?
We and the flowers throw shadows on the earth.
What has no shadow has no strength to live.
Chelsea Bieker (author of Godshot)
This poem is one of my all-time favorites.
Though it speaks of a wasted life, I find immense comfort in reading it.
Now as an adult, the possibility of that happening has left.
So what to make of life and memory once the promise of what you hoped for is gone?
The time, gone.
But yet Ruefle gives us hope and agency at the end: Life is still strewn with miracles.
Its up to us to find them.
“Voyager,” by Mary Ruefle
I have become an orchid
washed in on the salt white beach.
Emily Gould (author of Perfect Tunes)
This isn’t a comforting poem, exactly.
This was published a year ago but seems like it comes from the future to describe now.
Sometimes we were the ones
Doing the breaking.
We would comfort one another
Afterward, congratulating each other on the fortitude
It took to display such vulnerability.
Anyway it wasnt working.
None of it was working.
We were ancient
Creatures, built for love and war.
It was all we could see.
We were lost in a language of images.
It was growing difficult to speak.
Yet talk
Was everywhere.
