When asking how others were faring, We did not expect an honest or full response. What words can answer how we’re remaining alive? - Amanda Gorman

"Good Grief

The origin of the word trauma
Is not just "wound," but "piercing" or "turning,"
As blades do when finding home.
Grief commands its own grammar,
Structured by intimacy & imagination.
We often say:
We are beside ourselves with grief.
We can't even imagine.
This means anguish can call us to envision
More than what we believed was carriable
Or even survivable.
That is to say, there does exist
A good grief.

The hurt is how we know
We are alive & awake;
It clears for us all the exquisite,
Excruciating enormities to come.
We are pierced new by the turning
Forward.

All that is grave need
Not be a burden, an anguish.
Call it instead, an anchor,
Grief grounding us in the sea.
Despair exits us the same way it enters — Turning through the mouth.
Even now conviction works
Strange magic on our tongues.
We are built up again
By what we
Build/find/see/say/remember/know.
What we carry means we survive,
It is what survives us.
We have survived us.
Where once we were alone,
Now we are beside ourselves.
Where once we were barbed & brutal as blades,
Now we can only imagine."

Erasure demands a lifetime of rehearsal. Do you really understand what it is to be this disposable body. We recognize the sobs now for the flags they were. The jerk of our heads, as if waking from a dream — or a nightmare. You decide. This is not the nation we built, at most not the nation we've known. Know. Oh, no. This is the nation we've sewn. It is our right to weep for the wound we've always been. A silent shock out of the blue: a hand hung to another or a head pillowed by a shoulder is by far worth more than anything we've won or wanted. When told we can't make a difference, we'll still make a sound.

This poem & its pain are both imagined & as real as we are. That is to say, through some fictions we find fact; in some fantasies we discover ourselves & then some. Even without living it, a memory can live on in us. The past is never gone, just not yet found. Grief, like glass, can be both a mirror & a window, enabling us to look both in & out, then & now & how. In other words, we become a window pain. Only somewhere in loss do we find the grace to gaze up & out of ourselves.