Author: poetryfest

My hair was long and thick and coarse.
It sat in braids.
It stayed restrained.
It stayed down and made itself small.

It was thinned.
It was straightened for length,
perfumed,
colored.
*No—not that color!*

There are wrong colors?
Iron out my kinks,
tear the knots from the source.
Never fix—
simply change,
and change,
and alter.

A half step closer with a small root job,
a touch-up.
Make me look better.
Make me look pretty.
Make me acceptable,
passable,
palatable.

Shape me, gel me down,
stay in the place you need me to be in.

I wish I knew how I let it all get so long.
I know, I know—
I did it wrong.

Again, it’s a cut,
a prod,
a dye,
a curl—
not those curls—soft waves!
Whiter brighter curls.

Strip the dull locks to bring the light,
wear colors to tint the water in your eyes.
The green is not yours.
That brown and tan not either.

Be whiter.
Be brighter.
Be straighter.
Be nicer.
Be more ladylike.

Speak when spoken to;
let social graces bury your screams for comfort.

Heart, don’t be constricted
Eyes, don’t shed these tears
Lips, don’t quiver

What is coming is better
than what has passed

God will reunite us again;
This moment of grief is about to transform
Into an eternity of joy.

I hope to meet you soon
In Gardens as spacious as the Heavens and the Earth
A promise of the All Forgiving, the Most Loving.

Ashes of a kindle
Soot of delusion
A façade candle
Burning love fission

Moonlight , a witness
Deciphering an illusion
Fumes of severance
Evading the shadows

Shadow of beloved
Swindling the hour
Moments all seized
Desires flew ajar

A nightingale sings
hymn of seclusion
buzzing the firefly
rhythm of fusion

Rattle of union
Hallucinates the mind
Past of unison
Fades the choir

Deafen the sound
Clatter of split
A momentous disunion
Playing canticle occult

A tethered bond
Bled the skin
Manacles of kindred
Emotions all slain

Crush the shackle
Play carol of freedom
be a destiny oracle
music of liberty anthem

blowing out the flame
melted candle of passion
follow the firefly
be the light of night legion

The past is almost gone, yet it breathes,
A whisper etched in the hollow of my chest.
A scar remains, tender, aching, alive,
A map of words unsaid, of love unexpressed.

Time, the thief with silent feet,
Stole moments we didn’t know were fleeting.
In its grasp, the hours bled,
While we danced on the edge of meaning.

Now I stand in echoes, calling,
To shadows that cannot answer back.
Every pause, every lost embrace,
Every minute, a wound, a crack.

Grief wears no clock, it holds no end,
It lives where memories start to fade.
Yet in the ache, I hear your voice,
A fragile thread in the darkness laid.

Though the past dissolves, slipping fast,
That scar—it lingers, a stubborn fire.
It burns, it mourns, yet still it loves,
A testament to all we couldn’t aspire.

Grief is a word too small to hold the weight,
A five-letter burden, too heavy, too late.
It’s love with nowhere to rest, nowhere to stay,
A wound that won’t heal, no matter the day.

They say it makes us stronger, but they don’t know,
Grief doesn’t build us; it makes us slow.
It drags us through life, numb and afraid,
Hoping for peace, but finding only the shade.

Time moves on, but we remain frozen,
Chasing something that was once chosen.
We walk through the hours with empty eyes,
Grief is the silence after the goodbyes.

It strikes without warning, a memory, a sound,
The scent of his shirt, his voice in the crowd.
And suddenly, we’re drowning in tears,
Wishing we could forget all our years.

We brace for the blows, the ones still to come,
The ache in our chest, the weight of what’s done.
Grief is the shadow that never lets go,
It clings to our hearts, and it pulls us low.

How do you live when the light feels so far,
When the person you loved is now a dead star?
How do you laugh, how do you breathe,
When grief is the thing you can’t ever leave?

It’s a thief in the night, it’s a scream in the dark,
A flood of memories that leaves its mark.
Grief takes what it wants, and it takes all of you,
And leaves you with nothing, but sorrow to chew.

Every moment is heavy, the pain is so loud,
Like a storm that’s always inside of the crowd.
We’re hollow inside, a shell with no name,
Grief has erased us, we’re never the same.

We want to stop fighting, we want to let go,
But we know we can’t, though we’re dying so slow.
We carry this burden, too heavy to bear,
A lifetime of sorrow, a life so unfair.

How do we move on when the world is too cold,
When the pieces of our hearts are broken and sold?
Grief is the scar that never quite heals,
The constant reminder of everything we feel.

So we carry on, half-living, half-dead,
With tears in our eyes and a heart full of dread.
We smile through the pain, but inside we fall,
Grief is the silence that says it all.

The Maga will deliver what is owed
from a great hardware store
a department, the section
necessary fixtures and adhesives
for the job, guaranteed to cement
what’s so rickety, piles as they shift
rise majestic, up to high heaven
where Maga sits with open hands
open arms, flowing gown, granting.

I want to hold the hand inside you

My mom won’t eat Baby Ruth candy bars for a year. I look over her sins past committed and without thinking forgive her. Jehovah, Jehovah, come my Lord. She dreams of nothing and it hurts like it’s something. Who knew that emptiness could be a curse word?

I want to take the breath that’s true

I watch her through a window when she sits outside, talking on the phone, trying to be furtive as she describes grief symptoms with a therapist. I watch her hands subconsciously make a baby-sized oval that her tears soon wash away. Her chest rises and falls in a shudder-breath that could have started waves on the ocean.

I look to you and I see nothing

Heaven’s orchestra, she tells me, plays in her dreams and nightmares. Somehow, it always sounds the same.

I look to you to see the truth

Time after time I watch her drown. She is bedridden, curled up between the sheets with one earbud falling out, sucking in air, sucking in small pieces of nothing. A documentary blares in her ear. The words are meaningless, a foreign language, English and yet not quite. It’s a happy English that’s simply superficial in the light of earth-shattering grief, in the light of a baby lost before she could fight to stay alive.

You live your life, you go in shadows

Her nose is perpetually red from crying, from knowing that movies lie and tears cannot actually wake the dead. Innocence has died, and it too remains in the grave, fallen from grace. I try my best to let it survive, thinking maybe she appreciates the way my hands pull her hair out of her eyes. Or maybe she’d rather use it to hide. Sometimes I judge wrong. I let my mother grow up.

You’ll come apart and you’ll go blind

Bejeweled, she becomes it. She is bejeweled in misery and wonders why her face breaks out and her eyesight fails. The clock strikes nothing several times a week; everyone’s favorite number.

Some kind of night into your darkness

I hurt for her, and can no longer see either. I see so much of nothing. I see Ruth when I lie silently awake, drowning in my own quiet way. She is alive, somehow. This is all my fault, somehow. She is faceless. Emotionless. Is she nothing, or everything?

Colors your eyes with what’s not there

She is Ruth. No middle name. Just Ruth. Ruth Nothing-Everything. Was she coming from a set of divorced parents and keeping both names? All I know is that she was adopted too late by a world she was too good for. The only explanation is thus.

Fade into you

The ashes come to us later. No one remembers the name of the crematory who sifted through her remains to incinerate them. I still don’t remember how they come. Maybe they came home with my parents from the hospital. One way or another, they end up on my mom’s lap in a box that laughs at all of us with its careful carved beauty. It’s a respectful mockery, a silent twist of the knife, an accepted grudge.

Strange you never knew

Ruth did nothing and broke a hundred hearts by it. My mom floats through her days and holds on to a hope I cannot make sense of. It’s all senseless. People bring too much food and she slowly starves. I forget what I’ve eaten, I feel guilty I can eat. Did I not love her enough?

Fade into you

I lose track of the days. I pretend to be normal around my friends, who lose themselves in superficiality so they don’t have to address the elephant in the room. I feel guilty for smiling. Humor is there, but a shameful touch, the prick of the knife.

I think it’s strange you never knew

Pieces of my mom’s heart fit slowly back together in a jagged art form, and I am the observant Giacometti who stands and becomes a ghost. I try not to become my shriveling soul, dying in its corner of heaven’s hell. Nights get less worrisome when I no longer cry, but my mom keeps crying, so I don’t speak of babies. No one does. We are silent, and the ache cautiously edges its way out of my mother’s soul in flakes of fire

The sweet smell of cerulean seas
leaves me grounded by roots
in the only place I ever knew
the crashing waters of silent pleas

Do memories remain old
if they only exist
for when you last reminisce
I still do not know

She sounds of glittering sand
as she bluely floats near
with a sadness only I can hear
As if this was not planned

“What do you want?”
She came to claim my collapse
a dream explored but I had yet to renounce
“You know this was preordained, my
transient.”

I was aware of this and yet was
unexpectedly dismayed
“Will I still remember what I do not
recognise?

“Will I still feel what is impossible in the
other species?”
She said nothing but the response made
me disheartened

I felt tears come and hoped for more
knowing that this would be the last time
that pain and joy and love and hate would
be mine
but all I saw in the sea was someone raw
and sore

So I let this mourning take me by the hand
hope traded for grief of a life
that had to be handed over without strife
And let go, not knowing where I’d land

She drifted a presence through my hair
and I felt the shift of weight in water
as my limbs started to melt further
until I became a being unfair

She scooped up that little moon jellyfish
delivering him to the ocean
just as he had come before his dream
with no recollection of his completed wish

She knew that he would always return this
way
as he would wait out that favourable
condition
to the limit that his polyp could trade in
for that dream to feel just for a day

My mother is dead.
My father is dead.
My brother is dead.
My other brother is dead.
My sister is dead.
My nephew is dead.
My son is dead.
When will my family stop dying?
I’m never going to get used to it.

Surrender, sleep, then wake up
without the fatigue,
but the sadness you fled
still remains in the morning.

Last night, thinking,

“This will go away with sleep
and some dreams.”

This morning, realizing,
only the physical exhaustion
has abandoned you.

You thought melancholy might
disappear with
the arrival of visions.

And the dreams did come,
but carried despair into the morning