Grief is glass

Happy New Year!  2013, what an awkward little assortment of numbers.  I'm still putting off writing, so here are a few poems.

The day Mom came home for hospice I went out for errands, after waiting hours at the hospital for details and the right oxygen tank.

I knew I had to get colored pencils and journals, and Mom wanted plain yogurt.  I bought a set of three slim journals, my pencils, and two enormous tubs of yogurt.

I always bought her copious amounts of food; I think it was in hope that she'd live long enough to finish it.  Anyhow, one of the journals I turned into a poetry/prose journal.  

There are not as many poems as there are deranged scribbles, but a few stanzas survived.  I don't want to always be sad, but do want to be honest.  That's why I'm posting all the sad ones (they're not all sad) now so I don't have to prolong the process. 

Grief is glass

Grief is glass

shattering shattering

pieces get hid

glimmering glimmering

stuck into toes into fingertips searching

into nostrils inhaled clogging up lungs

some of it’s noble, knighted, sainted—

colored and carved and placed in

cathedrals

most of it’s dusty dirty sneaky grenades

private heartthrobs and breath catching sighs

yearning

   waiting

for something to shift, to resolve out of

            augmented diminished tritone agony

                        but

my hope is in another world

            my heart

my treasure

            has lifted off

and flown away

what is here for me except dusty glass and empty decades?  Life lived just so 

all can be at last at last at long last

finished…          and real life can start.

come.

Jesus—

come.

7.11.12  three days before Mom’s 54^th birthday

There is a soft sadness

There is a soft sadness
that sinks in-between
the everyday notches and watches of life

It curls up precisely
where it's hard to reach
and doesn't envelope until all is ripe

But when conversation's
the most ordinary
and when I would certainly rather not weep

The silky soft sadness
seeps up to my stomach
and creeps, how it leaps and it heaps.

8.5.12

And, to not end on a thoroughly heavy note, a little poem from God to me:
open your eyes

open your eyes, my love, my love

lift the lashy veils and colored muscled
     pools of soul
              to me, to me

the agony within will not cannot
            destroy me
for I am deeper still within
     the cloying hurt

8.6.12