For Those I Love Who Have Lost Someone They Love

[rabid1st]

Two of my dearest friends have lost those dear to them in the last two months. Words cannot abate the loss or still the frenzy of the mind occupied with grim mortality, however, there is a comfort in poetry...the soothing rhythm of it, I believe.

And so I offer two poems of comfort for my friends. The first is a bit spiritual for these two people...

A Poem
by Mary Oliver

The spirit
likes to dress up like this:
ten fingers,
ten toes,

shoulders, and all the rest
at night
in the black branches,
in the morning

in the blue branches
of the world.
It could float, of course,
but would rather

plumb rough matter.
Airy and shapeless thing,
it needs
the metaphor of the body,

lime and appetite,
the oceanic fluids;
it needs the body's world,
instinct

and imagination
and the dark hug of time,
sweetness
and tangibility,

to be understood,
to be more than pure light
that burns
where no one is --

so it enters us --
in the morning
shines from brute comfort
like a stitch of lightning;

and at night
lights up the deep and wondrous
drownings of the body

...and so...I offer a less brilliantly crafted, but perhaps more appropriate verse, as well..

A Poem
by Me

I had the dream
of missing you, again
of missing you, forever
of rushing for a train
that's just pulled out.

What I missed most
was your smile.
All my memories of you have it.
I take photos
from the album one by one.

Familiar laughter in your eyes,
I hear it ghosting
through the air.
Echoes fill this
hollow room inside me.

And I think I never told you
how vast that heart space is
where you'll sing and smile
and laugh for all my days.

I had the dream
of missing you, again,
of missing you, forever,
and I think I never told you,
never saying all those things
we never say.