Category: Death

• Lantern on path

  Lantern swinging down path — I wonder if it is really there, if that is you, or just some accident of moonlight and wind. How is it possible for the night to be so black that no adjective makes sense? Just black-black, with shadows hovering and the wild phlox lopped over reflecting greywhite back up.…

  Jenifer

  April 2, 2016

  Childhood, Death, Grief, Muse, My family, Pentwater

  poetry

• Simple grief

  bruised inside unable to feel my edges the weight dyed into me now, a flaw a hollow bell ringing itself, silent

  Jenifer

  March 26, 2016

  Death, Friendship, Grief, Love, My window at night, Violence, Yoga

• All last things

  i. all last things packed into tiny bags, duties, remembrances, cleavages, rejoinders peeling back slivers of known things, yet to learn things — putting them aside ii. It is a kind of love to be sure that draws us into this chapel to tend your last things, a blouse, a parent, a book, a lunch…

  Jenifer

  March 5, 2016

  Death, Grief, Violence

  poetry

• Clarity

  I cannot say it all started that night but that is when it became clear: dark, full, swelling wounds of inobvious origin bursting their seams, flying upon us all. This is not the thing we are meant for, not what we read in stories of educated ladies eating yogurt and bagels, drinking coffee in earnest…

  Jenifer

  February 10, 2016

  Death, Friendship, Grief, Memory, Political struggle, Violence, Work life

  poetry

• Prayer

  (upon learning of a friend’s violent death) i allow me to pause to rearrange my heart, its sinews, tissue, the rhythm it takes while I walk this street now, all making way for a new configuration you being gone in an instant, in the heat of that strangling hour give me some time yet to…

  Jenifer

  January 23, 2016

  Death, Emily Dickinson, Friendship, Grief, Violence, Work life

  poetry

• I do not cry loud for battle

  I do not cry loud for battle having given my hand already having held my dying kin having rested under this willow as the breeze swayed its lashes smooth across my breast having gazed into the open starlit sky with the wonder of many years yet to travel No, I do not cry loud but…

  Jenifer

  November 11, 2015

  Aging, Death, Memory, Public, Veteran’s Day

  poem