Grieving

Listen to Tove Lo’s album 'QUEEN OF THE CLOUDS’ here http://po.st/QOTC Music video by Tove Lo performing Stay High. (C) 2014 Universal Music AB

A new year starts with discarding

the things we no longer need

I am told

It feels wrong to throw out gifts from you

given a life’s time ago

What does it matter then that the lemon zester is blunt

or that the pattie maker never worked

that the pressure cooker sits quiet and opened

or the book on Low GI was never read

I have no future surprise from you to colour these spaces

  But I know that if I hold on too long

that the dust on the appliances that don’t work 

and the silence from the unread books 

will suffocate me

So I watch myself from the corner of my kitchen 

as I throw into cheap black bags from Checkers

the broken objects of your thoughtfulness

and breathe deeply. 

Spring cleaning

a year after your 

Tonight last year was the last time you ever spoke. It has been a year of words and pictures and grief for me- repeating you, all the memories I hold, watching the grief for you break into me. Needing to keep my business going but also needing to be still, to be with the wind, to find you in it.

A year ago you were alive today

I cradle you daily in the space between breathing in  and breathing out

It is a small place  that I cannot stay in long  a safe space  but also the precursor of Death and hope sometimes  I will find you there in the shallows in all of your magic. 

Mom came to visit

and we tried to walk your death

out of us

with frozen yoghurt

great distances of Ocean

and my tears

They say the best way out

is always through

but I fear the "throughness of things"

will crumble my mother's almost 80 year old bones

that the pressure of

struggling to live with the death of you

will dissolve the secret passages inside

and leave me lost and stuck in my own labyrinth

of sadness

I cried all the way to the airport

with her

as we both admitted that nine months

after your death

we were both even sadder  than

at the beginning.

Better still than through

It is right that things should change

from those hollow eyed times

There are others that await me now

when I wake

no longer just thoughts of you

and my loss

But when I see pictures of you

and the hurt starts again

in my jaw and my throat and my stomach

I know that I have not caged this

merciless, crafty animal of Grief yet

I will

one day

and I know there will be no prize.

Back on YouTube, this beautiful live version of Nothing Rhymed, by the Master himself!

And as the birds outside stir me into waking

I see your face in front of me

and tears fall down my pillow.

My beautiful, brave strong father

taken to other places

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TEXs5CXHyY