Untitled - Campbell University

Grief
“The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is. ... I grieve that grief
can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature.” -- Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Experience
Boys can drown in a drop of water,
they used to tell me when I was a child,
knees bloody from grinding my skin
into the gravel of my grandmother’s driveway
as I sailed ships of broken bark and petals
freshly stripped from the stems of azaelas
on the boundaries of the front yard.
I know you lost a child and first wife,
your grief a well whose bottom
you did find after a torturous descent
and whose meaning offered a drink
different from the one I have tasted.
You might have consoled yourself with religious
doctrines, but Marx’s opium meant nothing
to one who already had discarded old beliefs
like clothes beyond the point of mending.
Instead you looked to the underside of a flower
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