GRIEF Poem: Deathening Sirens, by Ariyana Ess

I never understood the phrase “deafening silence” until your departure, until our bodies no longer inhabited the same sky. Until I understood that our last words to each other were just that, the last. That they were our goodbyes. Until I gazed at a stranger and realized that you each had the same eyes.

Until my ears rang from the sound of grief, when melancholy robbed me of its dichotomous enemy, as a shovel pierced the ground beneath my feet. In this soil, that is now your body’s home. When the sound of dirt stained by death made the hairs of my body stand still
as yours lied
idle, alone.

It was not deafening,
but deathening.

As we all felt the fog of the dawn, beaming against our skin, when moments after, we swallowed libations of an unnamed
and unknown elixir, tasting of the bereavement within.

When you first departed all I could hear was everything, just as I saw.

A fallen angel on someone’s doorstep on our way to you. A clock paralyzed, like your legs, at 9:32. In our home, I heard reverberations of the machine that couldn’t keep you alive. The chatter of the TV that you never turned off, I can’t remember, was it channel 5?

I felt your hair. Still in my brush

Still.

I saw expired food, untouched and unconsumed by you,
leaving our fridge empty once thrown out, as our hearts and
stomachs were.
Though not our minds,
for they were still trying to accept what was now true.

I never saw any of these things before, not until the color scales of my life were no longer stained by you, or yours.

I watched the illusory sight of a lightbulb in your room flicker in the afternoon. I watched the clock draw past 9:32, as I watched the sky finally change its hues.

Only this time,
I knew that it was you.
Because you painted the sky blue