GRIEF Poem: Awakening, by Joe Taglieri

We awoke.

The first drops
Were mistaken for tears,
But as more crashed down, yellow and bubbling,
They ate through the stone of our beloved’s rest,
Bones refusing degradation peeked through
The blinds of this day; We saw
its jaw barely clinging to solidity,
Nestled below chewed vertebrae thrashed
beneath a pillow of rat fur—
An eyeless skull transfixed on the surface
left in an inaudible scream. I can still hear it.

What yearly remaining reverences were now barely stems,
In a week dead like the remembered,
thirst clutching its snipped roots. I recall the In-memoriams ripped
from the ground melting against
a purpling, tritone sky.

There is no gravestone anymore,
Only disturbed earth.

Children wandered to pay respects for what lay buried:
Their name a forgotten
cicada song
echoing
in the bleeding chambers of the forest;
They do not know why they came;
they don’t know why they’ve stopped—

Once, the rain hung thick like a promise:
Wisps of cloud broke, but they never fell—

Before the downpour
our mothers and fathers crafted
brick from sticks and hope, A house a firm home for their children
and children’s children, Telling cirrus
stories of dreams by candle light—
They believed the clouds would pass, that there was
Still life beneath the corpse shade
casting blackness on vibrant reds and blues.

On the other side of the world, it’d begun to rain;
It was an endless supercell for
those who saw beyond the clouds—
They knew better—

The freshly dead floated by in the flood,
Carrying stone stories in their chests, dead air shouting
in static mumble,
Each syllable an exposed femur coated in hard ice,
Freezing, melting and freezing again—
Crafting a titan hidden beneath the water,
Dead and unburied,
Sinking unsinkable ships,
Another new, uncaring god.

Gathered in our homes,
We saw the unlaid brick
in the yard, a wheelbarrow of concrete
now stone—we waited too long to build anything
Strong enough to hold us.

I began to tremble as the ground below shifts,
Beneath my feet, I tasted the ruin.

We awoke.

The silence heavier than any nightmare
the walls around us cave in—
There never was a dream—
This waterlogged grave
merely held the facsimile of
a long dead memory
too broken to recognize,
A name falsified called “hope.”

The clouds burst open like a fresh scab,
The wound spilling out a reckoning.