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Life has been noisy. A year has passed. Everywhere but the page. My pages remain silent, blank, and at peace. Is this what death is? M spoke to me of oblivion as it’s own paradise. My naked pages are guilt-free. In this past year I have been learning a new patience for harvesting. That there is more living to be done before my heart can write about it. The heart’s pace is supremely stubborn and correct.

I have been reading the words of Rachel Eliza Griffiths and Victoria Chang with deep affection and gratitude. Each speaks to the loss of her mother with devastating clarity. We never want to readily admit that our suffering can be articulated with any justice let alone mirrored in the art of another. And yet that is where art does most of its magic. This is how poetry can alter us. In shedding the notion of the “I” and stepping into the “We” , into the “Her”, into the “You”. Grief is a language that none of us wanted to learn, yet one we must speak and comprehend if we are to make sense of the only thing that proves more impossible than the fact of the loss: the imperative to live in a reality marked by it. It is the language of extraordinary giants who have watched their own God fall.