As if Christmas isn’t hard enough

With its all your family home

And you not telling

One will never come home again

Not shouting your anger

But pushing hard a silent smile

A week later there’s taking down the tree

Alone as it only can be

When the anger wells

And the sorrow flows

At each ornament dated in the beautiful past

And the remembered guilt when they put up the tree

How I turned away crying inside

And please god next year

May I be able to join and help deck out the tree

And make Christmas a joy

For those still gathering memories.

A Dream of Discussing God

(In a dream someone asked me)

"Don't you find that God is an arrogant child?"

("Listening to no one and running wild,"

I thought in answer.

I remember the weathered face and the piercing light eyes,

And how he smiled slightly as he talked.

As if he knew Him.)

Between Grief and Going On
To find a balance takes something.
The deep dizziness,
The indecision.
Blurred vision
Facing the future.
Life isn't over,
Though destroyed.
You can hardly stand
But you take a step.
Drag your feet
But keep walking.

I'll read the night and sleep the day

And so perhaps will pass away

The time I dread and cannot face:

Remembering the empty place.

The calendar returns the day.

The path we walked is still a way

I walk alone and see your face.

But tears and absence took your place.

Poems, stories, dreams, I waste the day,

Unconsciousness the only way.

I hide from and I seek your face

In memory or out-world place.

                    ***

I'm awash and aswim 

in the missing of him

and the sadness and darkness and pain.

And the anger rolls on

and over me on

to the ends of the worlds that I'm in.

Hovering however high

The feathered eye

Goes seeing by.

I upturned under-sky

Pale fac-ed eye

Crawl hardly seeing by,

Too tethered to

The surface soil

To view with wings askew

From bold unbounded blue

As eagles do.

Blank before God

I step out of the shower.

He hasn't spoken to me in years

Or so much as inclined his ear

What am I to think?

But I learned about love as a youngling 

and I remember how to be loved.

I learned to love as a mother,

And I know the permanence of love,

Unwavering in the face of imperfection,

Diamond and lasting forever.

Maybe in my soul no longer a child

I do not need what I knew,

All that was taken away.

The sign on the door

COME TELL TOUR TROUBLES

I stepped into the room

Was that a shadowy figure 

Or just my expectation?

Trusting I

Began to list the woes 

Poured out my heart and told it

To someone?

There being no answer

No nod

No sympathetic gesture

I stood to go

I may return