Cecil Morris
After Our Daughter’s Death at 39
Our daughter’s organs arranged themselves alphabetically
and then by height, shortest to tallest, like school children
after recess late in spring, a little breathless, a little sweaty,
reluctant to enter the classroom and take their desks again.
They were done with books and learning, sick of spelling bees,
exhausted by multiplication and its arduous
undoing. They wanted summer’s idyllic idleness,
its sleeping in and afternoons splashing in the pool.
We imagined watching them from the porch, tired ourselves,
and ready at last to see them take their leave, to see them make
their way in the world, to become astronauts or doctors
or ballerinas or fire fighters or anything at all,
but our daughter’s organs, colonized by cancer, can not
parade their ways to other lives in futures far and wide.
In quiet coming on of dusk, they dropped to the ground
as lifeless as the clothes our daughter no longer needed.
Grief Is a Mischievous Child
Grief is a sneaky sucker
who hides at the end of the hall,
around a corner, behind a door,
still, patient, waiting
to spring out and shock,
to make you gasp again
at loss almost outlived,
to make you quake and sob
again where you would rather not.
Grief, the dark shape of bat
at twilight passing face, eyes,
too fast, too close, to see
aright, more startle than sight,
delights in dark on dark.
Grief, the sudden drop
of an unseen curb or step,
the halted plunge, the almost fall
followed by clumsy stagger,
returns your dead, not quite ghost,
to shake you into sorrow.
Grief thinks it great fun
to surprise and surprise,
the joke that never gets old.
Grief is a sneaky sucker,
a mischievous child,
but you hold it close, love it,
because it is your own.
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