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Tag: grief

Published on Leave a comment on In the Autumn of Our Friendships

I tease you about a friendship that ended
because, of course, I am a boor.
And because the mystery of a dumping,
long ago, has been solved.
The thrust of hostility
from a woman’s longtime friend, in their 80s.
Unprovoked. Abrupt. Painful and cruel.

I can see for myself how relationships end,
having blundered into their age group.
Like leaves dropping off trees in the fall.
Sometimes gently with a touch of kindness,
sometimes without ceremony. Impersonally
when "this number is no longer in service."
“Mail is no longer deliverable to this address."

For us, loving friendships are forever.
Perhaps separating our friendship from others.
With love missing or one-sided.
Or social relationships for appearances.
Like the woman wounded by relationship
with a money-obsessed social climber
moved not by love but by envy.

Holiday greetings become more meaningful,
more fun and satisfying for me as I age.
While for most of those I greet
it seems to be the opposite.
Tinting affect with melancholy,
but also relieving the weight of relationships
whose time has come.

You are teased away from your grief
and from the weight of what’s no longer there.
That you might share in the delicacy of aging.
The beauty of a season when friendships
that graced a lifetime turn color and fall.

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Published on 1 Comment on The Hello that Won’t Become Goodbye

We relate to that which can leave us
When it seems there is no other choice
The only one possible Hellos that sadden
When time passes, things change,
And they become Goodbyes.

How else could it be in a world of absence
Where we’ve lost the presence of that
Which won’t leave us
In a fog of never Now, never light, never visible,
Never Here with us where we are
If we are anywhere at all.

Yet the Hello of Love that lasts forever finds us
Somehow connects us to a state of Mind
Where there is only Good, and it can never end
Whose connection cannot be broken
Because it established itself.

Because we did not go to it, we went nowhere
It came to us of its own accord
Just as it can leave of its own accord
If we imagine that it’s an object to be possessed
To be ruled by arbitrariness and abuse.

The Hello of Love that lasts forever
Needs no choosing if it’s chosen us
So gentle and tender that it slips by awareness
So harmless that it opens and occupies
our most vulnerable space, unnoticed.

Our Heart, as though it had been there all along
And why not? This is its Home where it belongs
The Soul of Oneness whose door is open
To hearts everywhere when we get out of the way.

When we do what is asked of us and let it go
Set it free – the Good that we do when we share it
Touching one another with Love
Hellos that won’t become Goodbyes.

 

Published on Leave a comment on The Fire of Time

The warmth and light from time
The fire that consumes all evidence of my being
Draws me to it in my grief

As if its embers home to my tears
Could bring us back together again
As if the dog curled up by the fireplace
And those of us still living

Could summon forth those who are not
Could restore the tenderness
That flickered in my child’s soul

A moment of having and touching
Before it was taken away