Poets and Poems: Sarah Carey and “The Grief Committee Minutes”

A year passed before I came face to face with the grief over the death of my father. There wasn’t time for me to grieve; I was the executor of his estate, and his estate was a mess. A huge mess. He’d kept my mother unaware of just what a mess it was, and she was as bewildered as the rest of the family. When we finally emerged from the financial fog, grief hit me like a freight train. 

“There is no grief like the grief that does not speak,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow once wrote. The man knew what he was talking about.

 

Poet and writer Sarah Carey knows about grief. Her new poetry collection, The Grief Committee Minutes, isn’t solely about grief, but much of it is. What I particularly like is how Carey identifies and explores the kinds of grief.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

T.S. Eliot Put His World Back Together Again – Douglas Murray at The Free Press.

 

New Release! The Colour Out of Space Graphic Novel, Illustrated by Sara Barkat – Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

The Cure – poem by Gabrielle Myers at Every Day Poems.

 

How I Turned My Family History into a Novel – Joanne Howard at Writer’s Digest.

 

“Mr. Flood’s Party,” poem by Edward Arlington Robinson – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

Poets and Poems: B.H. Fairchild and "An Ordinary Life"

I can’t imagine the grief of losing a child, and I hope I never experience it. In our minds, at least, and in our cultures, the death of a child violates the natural order of things. My grandmother never spoke much about it, nor my father, but I would hear occasional murmurs about Eloise, the daughter and sister who died at age 2 in 1915. My father would have been her little brother, so he never actually knew her. My grandmother mourned her child the rest of her life, but it was a quiet, intensely personal mourning. 

It was that kind of quiet mourning that I discovered when reading An Ordinary Life: Poems by B.H. Fairchild. He did experience the grief from loss of a child when his son Paul died at age 46 in 2017. It’s not the same as losing a young child or an infant, because now an almost full lifetime of experience and memory is packed into the death. And there’s a daughter-in-law and grandchildren to be considered.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

The Temple of Mithras and Vince Street Roman Wall – A London Inheritance.

 

A Headstone Dedication for John S. Taplin – Darren Rawlings at Emerging Civil War.

 

Things Worth Remembering: The Singing Will Never Be Done – Douglas Murray at The Free Press.

 

Accused of Spying: Fannie Cowper of Suffolk, Virginia – Jeff Giambrone at Emerging Civil War.

 

Firefighter Artists of the Blitz – Spitalfields Life.

Poets and Poems: Ellie O'Leary and "Breathe Here"

It was likely the poet’s name, but I was well into Breathe Here: Poems by Ellie O’Leary when I realized she wasn’t writing about her childhood in an Irish village. Instead, she was writing about her childhood in a village in Maine. But the sense of being a part of an Irish Catholic family is so strong that I think I can be forgiven. 

O’Leary writes about an array of subjects – illness (her own and others’), wildlife, childhood, and, eventually, Maine. But if there is one predominating theme, is that of loss, and loss in childhood. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Black Flies – poem by David Estringel (H/T: Nigel Kent). 

 

After 10 years, the Orthodox shepherds of Aleppo remain missing – Terry Mattingly at Get Religion.

 

Poetry Prompt: Being a Pilgrim and a Martha Stewart Homemaker – Callie Feyen at Tweetspeak Poetry.

The canoe on the river

Early Sunday morning

I didn’t expect to see

a canoe on the river,

gliding in silence,

water like liquid glass;

a smooth reflection 

but unclear, slightly

blurred. I strained

to hear the sound 

of a paddle slicing 

through the current

but it was already

too far away. I called

out but the canoeist 

didn’t look up, didn’t 

see me watching from 

above, and while

I was too far away

to see the face, I knew

I had seen it before

in a mirror.

Fall had turned, 

and I missed it

like I missed 

so much else.

The editors of Tweet6speak Poetry are hosting a 30-Day, 30-Poem Challenge for Earth Month entitled, appropriately enough, Poetic Earth Month. Today, the featured poem is “Aubade” by L.L. Barkat, and the poetry prompt is to write a love or friendship poem that captures a sense of loss.

Pond shadows

Walking the garden, I thought

you were being coy, matching

the shadows in the pond.

It was less than that, shadows

creeping through the trees,

dark reflections in the water.

It was more than that, sounds

of shadows entering water,

telling me what I could not hear.

It was exactly that, shadows

disappearing into the dusk

growing around us, then me.

Photograph by Muhammed Kara via Unsplash. Used with permission.

(This poem was submitted to a photo poetry prompt, with a different photo, for the Poets in the Original group at MeWe.)

“My Favorite Color is Blue. Sometimes” by Roger Hutchison

Can colors help you deal with grief?

It sounds like an odd question, but it is the question posed indirectly by author and illustrator Roger Hutchison in My Favorite Color is Blue. Sometimes: A Journey through Loss with Art and Color.

What Hutchison does in this small, beautiful book is paint the colors of grief and healing. The words are relatively few; what draws our attention are the paintings and illustrations.

“Blue is my favorite color.

Just not today.

Today I feel blue—the swirling blue of a rainstorm.

The storm is inside me.

I am angry.

I am sad.

My heart is hurting.”

What those words are paired with is a n abstract painting of shades of blue, black, white and a post or two of yellow – and it precisely depicts an interior storm.

And so Hutchison writes and paints. Love and anger. Quiet, listening, and remembering. The silent night sky. The yellow of a shooting star. The brown of summer dirt. The moon low in the evening sky. Snow falling in a winter sky. Orange, And the green of new life.

Roger Hutchison

These are the colors of grief, because there are the colors, the sights, the sensations, and the smells of the one who is lost. At the end, Hutchison includes a list of ways to remember and celebrate the life of one who’s been lost, and a list of resources on grief and loss.

Hutchison is an artist and author, and also director of Christian Formation and Parish Life at Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church in Houston, Texas. He is the author of The Painting Table: A Journal of Loss and Joy (2013), Under the Fig Tree: Visual Prayers and Poems for Lent (2015), and the forthcoming Jesus: God Among Us (February 2018). He and his family live in suburban Houston.

Before this little book, all of 34 pages, I’d never thought of grief and loss as color, or considering color as a way of dealing with loss. This book changes that.

Top photograph by Stefan Gunnarsson via Unsplash. Used with permission.

L.L. Barkat’s “Love Etc.: Poems”

We traveled south, recently, toward a funeral in New Orleans. We could see the trees and bushes along the highway changing: still stark, bare and gray in Missouri; the beginnings of greenery in Arkansas; the green growing gradually upward in Mississippi; and finally the complete greenery that is southern Louisiana most of the year.

Traveling toward a funeral, and family, and childhood and growing up, and finally leaving, it was a journey combining all of the elements of the subtitle of L.L.Barkat’s new collection of poems – Love Etc.: Poems of Love, Laughter, Longing and Loss.

I even found a poem that almost exactly described our journey south:

Winter Road Trip

The road is long as I travel south

and the sun is low in the white sky.

Last night I woke to a great silence,

in a house that is anything but silent

by day. Old pines keep watch

over that dwelling, and the moon

keeps watch, and I wish

for this kind of watching,

but my bedroom in the town where I live

looks out over streetlights and the sounds

of cars and sirens. In my room,

the roads seem short, and I wonder

if tonight I will dream of the long road

home, and how the sun bathed the trees

in gold, and how the sumacs leaned with flowers

the color of some wine whose name

I can’t remember, near the trees whose names

I’ve never known, now strung with long red necklaces.

I read these beautiful poems, and I’m struck with how closely connected love, laughter, longing and loss truly are. Even love and loss, and not in an obvious way like love lost, but in a less obvious but perhaps more accurate way – one experiences love and all of what has come before becomes a kind of loss, never to be found or rediscovered in precisely the same way, because love changes everything.

Barkat takes us on a journey with these poems, and not only a winter road trip south. She takes us to the edge of illness, to the borders of erotic love, to the defined realities of sight, sound and smell and the loves that stands before the stove in the kitchen, cooking soup. The poems are not only about relationships between people, and lovers, but more than that, and there is something more than that, the love that longs, that laughs, the love that sacrifices, and even the love that becomes represented by loss.

And beyond the journey, Love Etc. contains poems for the standing still, those moments that are eternity. This poem, “Ours,” is the poem our mothers repeat to themselves, including the mother whose funeral I’m attending:

We call them to the world

before we even know their names,

before we understand

what it will mean

to lean beside their beds

on breath-thin nights.

They teach us

how to hold their hands,

shut the lights,

pray for dawn.

I have been leaned over on those breath-thin nights, and I’ve been taught by my own children how to hold their hands.

Love Etc. reminds us what eternity is, and what part of it is contained within ourselves.

Photograph by Sabine Sauermaul via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.