Pain, death, loss, grief. The weight of them all has born down on me with seemingly unrelenting force as of late. My brain tries to reconcile the unreconcilable and comprehend the incomprehensible. Where cognition fails, spirit speaks. The poem below is for all who have known sorrow; for all those who have been clenched in the unrelenting grip of grief.
Life is breaths held between deaths.
The space between living and losing is a puff of air that inflates vast spaces in the chest.
Now they rise, now they fall, now they never rise again.
Grief is deaths with every breath.
The space between living and grieving is a moment of violence that steals flesh and bone and infinite love.
Now they are here, now they are gone, now they will never be here again.
Love is every breath they ever breathed.
The space between living and loving is an eternal song sometimes a lullaby and sometimes a death knell.
Now it soothes, now it keens, now it cries endlessly into the night.