Explore Poems: Grief

i will die this month. how
i do not know. still there
is much work to be done. i
am afraid not for myself…

Even weeks after you went, they came:
Frontgate, Fresh Finds, Hearthsong—the names blurring,
the smiling…

 kung saan ako dinala ng aking mga paa,
 latak ng alaalang nililigaw ako
na parang engkanto,
 na parang…

 I was dragged to by my feet,
 memories misled me
with their leavings, an engkanto
 made my native …

Before I was born, my mother says, there was another boy. My brother. One day, half-asleep during lunch…

our vow—
if vowless by thirty
then us

was such
a stupid, childish way
to say love.

but love we were…

“I can’t breathe,” he said.
But there was no air.
Only the absence of trees
and rope. The swaying
of…

i . sorrow is the curved ribcage of a beautiful death,

but i know better. i know poets like you don’t do no half-steppin. especially not on your way out. especially…

do you remember in fifth grade
when i was all of eighty pounds
soaking wet and fully clothed
i told you…

You should, once I’m gone, mourn only as long
as you hear the bell, the dark one, from the tower;
as long…

Under the billowing heat of the white
tarpaulin church tent, my mother lowered
her worshipping hands and…

i.

But Noah found grace in the eyes of the lord
and thus formed the habit of my non-naming,

there …

My phone memory is full
of canvases I have cried in front of—
circles, holes—
Shadows on water.

___…

To mourn an impossible life—
we have become objects of a King

we will never see.
All water has become black…

एगो असंभव जीवन शोक करे खाितर—
हम लोगन कोई राजा के वस्तु बन गइली

जे राजा के हम कभी ना देखब।
सब पानी कारा…

Here before the sun rises, I find it difficult to make the words, to lean
forward three years after your…

I dreamed you called without reason, picking up where we left the
water months ago. Origins without …

my hands are still my hands
like my grandfather’s hands
are his hands and they
are on the window
attached…

i

Sonorous music for voice— I hear
a short but elegiac,

 pained

melody— for long discarded

dreams of a simple…