Poem: Ritual for Ash

Ritual for Ash
by Cindy Williams Gutierrez

We will smudge
our shoulder blades with wings of ash.

We will sow
your remaining ash in an untilled field.

We’ll toss
red carnations, red dahlias, red hibiscus.

We’ll release
white doves and flutter white handkerchiefs.

We’ll return
to the field to watch brave bulls roam.

We will wait
for the grass to catch fire.

Poem: The Difference

"The Difference"
by Thomas Hardy

I

Sinking down by the gate I discern the thin moon,
And a blackbird tries over old airs in the pine,
But the moon is a sorry one, sad the bird’s tune,
For this spot is unknown to that Heartmate of mine.

II

Did my Heartmate but haunt here at times such as now,
The song would be joyous and cheerful the moon;
But she will see never this gate, path, or bough,
Nor I find a joy in the scene or the tune.

 https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/difference-0

Poem: Echolocation

"Echolocation"
by Sally Bliumis-Dunn

The whales can’t hear each other calling
in the noise-cluttered sea: they beach themselves.
I saw one once— heaved onto the sand with kelp
stuck to its blue-gray skin.
Heavy and immobile
it lay like a great sadness.
And it was hard to breathe with all the stink.
Its elliptical black eyes had stilled, were mostly dry,
and barnacles clustered on its back
like tiny brown volcanoes.
Imagining the other whales, their roving weight,
their blue-black webbing of the deep,
I stopped knowing how to measure my own grief.
And this one, large and dead on the sand
with its unimaginable five-hundred-pound heart.


https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/echolocation

Poem: Pastoral

"Pastoral"
by David Baker

Here at the center      of a field            of green
                                                                                  
leaves waving            center of a         grief I can’t

see far enough           to tell how         it will ease

it will not ease           it goes on           and on now

as yours does            in sunlight         and in rain

holding hands with    her in the           last minutes


https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/pastoral-2

Poem: Ebb

 "Ebb"
by Edna St. Vincent Millay

I know what my heart is like

      Since your love died:

It is like a hollow ledge

Holding a little pool

      Left there by the tide,

      A little tepid pool,

Drying inward from the edge.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44720/ebbI?fbclid=IwAR0EN7vpz_8IPjiaG2B_gdZqzklbqChOk3iRXsMxdh3GA-rsYCXv5sYCw24

Poem: Ever

"Ever"
by Meghan O'Rourke

Never, never, never, never, never.
—King Lear

Even now I can’t grasp “nothing” or “never.”
They’re unholdable, unglobable, no map to nothing.
Never? Never ever again to see you?
An error, I aver. You’re never nothing,
because nothing’s not a thing.
I know death is absolute, forever,
the guillotine—gutting—never to which we never say goodbye.
But even as I think “forever” it goes “ever”
and “ever” and “ever.” Ever after.
I’m a thing that keeps on thinking. So I never see you
is not a thing or think my mouth can ever. Aver:
You’re not “nothing.” But neither are you something.
Will I ever really get never?
You’re gone. Nothing, never—ever.

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/ever?fbclid=IwAR1nCBQ9AHbErfzz5rMAJkH3xuCOz1sw1P0RNK4OLPnC311ET3s4AtpaKhs

Poem: Insomnolence

"Insomnolence"
by Charles Rafferty

I navigate the dark house by moving from the green star of the smoke detector to the blue star of the electric toothbrush. I am no different than Magellan or Marco Polo, I am guided by what burns. Some nights I step onto the back porch. The prow of it charges the blackness, while the stars above me sharpen and blur. Inside, I harbor the ache of what is no longer possible.

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/insomnolence?fbclid=IwAR1mddXAdbAJqNYrG34h8Qy6SvEgf1pj2HUM-KsM-xTolQcqTO7k1DPPYmI

Poem: The Comfort of Dakness

The Comfort of Darkness
by Galway Kinnell

Darkness swept the earth in my dream,
Cold crowded the streets with its wings,
Cold talons pursued each river and stream
Into the mountains, found out their springs
And drilled the dark world with ice.
An enormous wreck of a bird
Closed on my heart in the darkness
And sank into sleep as it shivered.
Not even the heat of your blood, nor the pure
Light falling endlessly from you, like rain,
Could stay in my memory there
Or comfort me then.
Only the comfort of darkness,
The ice-cold, unfreezable brine,
Could melt the cries into silence,
Your bright hands into mine.

Poem: Valediction: A Forbidden Mourning

Valediction: A Forbidden Mourning

by John Donne

As virtuous men pass mildly away,

   And whisper to their souls to go,

Whilst some of their sad friends do say

   The breath goes now, and some say, No:

So let us melt, and make no noise,

   No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;

'Twere profanation of our joys

   To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears,

   Men reckon what it did, and meant;

But trepidation of the spheres,

   Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love

   (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit

Absence, because it doth remove

   Those things which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined,

   That our selves know not what it is,

Inter-assured of the mind,

   Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,

   Though I must go, endure not yet

A breach, but an expansion,

   Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so

   As stiff twin compasses are two;

Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show

   To move, but doth, if the other do.

And though it in the center sit,

   Yet when the other far doth roam,

It leans and hearkens after it,

   And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,

   Like th' other foot, obliquely run;

Thy firmness makes my circle just,

   And makes me end where I begun.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I first read this poem deeply in grad school, and love it's end point. That separation of true loves isn't about the physical distance, but that as poles, or magnets, they pull each other back together. 

Poem: Loss

Loss
by Rodney Gomez

Lately I have been a gap.
Moth clouds follow me to bed.
I counted them: twenty, fifty, block, choke.

In the room where I used to sleep
a breath hangs low on the bed
and hoarsens the room.
No one knows where the air is
charged and released into the world,
but it thistles.

This is how breathing fills a house
with family: breathing to draw
the buzzing to its source
and breathing to lacquer a plugged maze.

How a house fully beamed and walled
is not a house, but a husk.
How a life in the span of a few breaths
becomes a clockless thing.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I describe my grief as suffocating, and the image of "thistle[d]" air speaks to me - I almost choke on the intensity of my grief - the air is rough and difficult, spiked.

The last stanza too, reminds me of our house: the hollowness of it - the soul of the space has deflated.

Poem: In this short Life that only lasts an hour (1292)

In this short Life that only lasts an hour (1292)
by Emily Dickinson

In this short Life that only lasts an hour

How much - how little - is within our power

Poem: [love is more thicker than forget]

[love is more thicker than forget]

by e.e. cummings

love is more thicker than forget

more thinner than recall

more seldom than a wave is wet

more frequent than to fail

it is most mad and moonly

and less it shall unbe

than all the sea which only

is deeper than the sea

love is less always than to win

less never than alive

less bigger than the least begin

less littler than forgive

it is most sane and sunly

and more it cannot die

than all the sky which only

is higher than the sky

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/22224/love-is-more-thicker-than-forget?fbclid=IwAR0_UPmlA3LM_V23vyIwT_PKCwlFp7qZunvvnALe0tJYP_O_Ko1s-wVxJHc

Poem: Elegy

Elegy
by Mong-Lan

& what if hope crashes through the door what if

that lasts a somersault?
hope for serendipity
even if a series of meals were all between us
even if the aeons lined up out
of order
what are years if not measured by trees

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This is what grief feels like to me right now - a bit jumbled and random.

Love's Philosophy

Percy Bysshe Shelley


The fountains mingle with the river
And the rivers with the ocean,
The winds of heaven mix for ever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single,
All things by a law divine
In one another's being mingle—
Why not I with thine?

See the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdain'd its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea—
What is all this sweet work worth
If thou kiss not me?

Love

“Doubt thou the stars are fire;
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Small Love

As it has been said:
Love and a cough
cannot be concealed.
Even a small cough.
Even a small love.

- Anne Sexton

The Definition of Love

My Love is of a birth as rare
As 'tis for object strange and high:
It was begotten by Despair
Upon Impossibility.

Magnanimous Despair alone
Could show me so divine a thing,
Where feeble Hope could ne'er have flown
But vainly flapped its Tinsel wing.

And yet I quickly might arrive
Where my extended soul is fixt,
But Fate does iron wedges drive,
And always crowds itself betwixt.

For Fate with jealous eye does see
Two perfect Loves; nor lets them close:
Their union would her ruin be,
And her tyrannic power depose.

And therefore her decrees of steel
Us as the distant Poles have placed,
(Though Love's whole World on us doth wheel)
Not by themselves to be embraced.

Unless the giddy Heaven fall,
And Earth some new convulsion tear;
And, us to join, the World should all
Be cramped into a planisphere.

As lines so Loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet:
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite can never meet.

Therefore the Love which us doth bind,
But Fate so enviously debars,
Is the conjunction of the Mind,
And opposition of the Stars.

~ Andrew Marvell