Book of Grief

In the quiet of The Golden Boat, we recall our experiences as souls upon the human journey. Grief arrives in many forms along this way. In glancing back towards older grief, we shine a light forward.

I want to go HOME.  

She said 

“Listen for the distance 

between things.” 

There…

we heard it.

The heart. 

Faint, 

but beating still. 

Maimed, 

but alive. 

Broken, 

yet calling with all its might 

for help. 

She said 

“Find the soft, 

the gentle, 

and the mess 

in the effort 

towards that.”

But in a sordid turn, 

we 

became 

just me. 

Here I sit 

with a mess of uncertainty 

so vast.

Unknowns 

beyond imagining,

trying to open to the tender possibility 

that healed love brings. 

I saw you. 

I did. 

Briefly, 

reluctantly, 

emerging from the stone. 

Then in a flash, 

missing again. 

Robbed

by a rageful beast.

Grief carries me now 

to a foreign place, 

while I ever reach 

to the beauty 

trapped beneath the stone.

Dropping into 

this space apart, 

I am struck dumb. 

How did we arrive at this empty? 

Recklessly? 

Thoughtlessly? 

Selfishly? 

Where is the bridge 

that delivers us to the other? 

Lost now to chaos. 

In waking from a dream

I call to you, 

but you are gone. 

I am left with your clothes staring at me

and I at them.

He's ridden with us all along…

the hammer that smashed our world 

into these broken parts.  

POSTLUDE

This is not HOME.

Swept away 

by a spell are you. 

Carried by delusion 

to land and time distorted.

Blinded, 

while the gift rests before you, 

though in your stupor 

you cannot see 

me. 

“Wake up, wake up, wake up” 

wept she.

My sister sings sweetly 

“There is that with wings 

some call hope.”    

© 2017 AJW

From the 2017 world premiere of IN THE COMPANY OF GHOSTS at New Hazlett Theater-Pittsburgh, PA. Above photos by Heather Mull (www.heathermull.com)