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Do you grieve in heaven?
Do you feel hollow too?
Do you feel like something's missing?
Like our incompletion without you.
Goodbyes were not granted to us,
Does this upset you too?
Does grief hit you by surprise?
An oppression you never knew?
Or is Olympus free of mourning?
And you have no suffering heart?
Will we meet in the city of immortals,
Will it feel like we've been apart?
Tell m...

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Why must you? If I could just understand the reasons for your soul-reaping hand. 

Who decided the time was up? Or that we must endure this grief? Tell me, Death- Do you enjoy your role as loves thief? 

You broke my heart into pieces a few times before and now you've done it once more. 

I'm not sure I can forgive you for such dark spite because you've taken my world and turned out its ligh...

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One whole year's

time emptied

Like lace leaves

From the cold trees

Skeletal wisps

You are missing 

attic tinsel 

Boxed deep and dusting

With bristles flaking

From the broken spine

So no silver lines 

Our crisp, black-branched pine.

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Christmas fairy lights still dangle,
Plastic string of neon candles,
Hallowing the wreckage of the year.

Streaming ‘River’ on repeat
River Warbling marrow-deep

Wash away those spiteful, December bones.

From jigsaws sat on nickel knees
To whisky-nursing you in sprees,
Femurs first you left us piece by piece.

Frailty distils the waters
Trickles down through all your daughters

...

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This poem is deeply personal to me and is about my time I spent as a crisis worker helping people who were experiencing mental health emergencies or attempts of suicide. The subject of this poem is suicide; please know that its contents could be triggering. If you or someone you know and love are experiencing suicidal thoughts or need to reach out, please don't hesitate to talk to someone. You are...

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While mourning his daughter Tullia, Cicero took to writing a book of self-consolation. Thinking himself the inventor of this type of self-help, he said, “Why, I have done what no one has done before, tried to console myself by writing a book.” (This is quoted by Han Baltussen in the Nov. 2009 issue of Mortality in an essay titled, “A grief observed: Cicero on remembering Tullia.”)

I certainly d...

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My dad's favourite shoes

He saved them for best

He wore them just once

As we laid him to rest

Dedicated to the loving memory of Jack Evans; love you dad x

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No more confusion, no more pain,

Just a stillness of mind at the ending of time.

Another leaf’s fallen, unseen by the world.

But I watched the fall.

A silent descent,

But I heard the call.

He cried out, there was fear in his voice,

He tried to give comfort now removed of the choice,

Allowed one brief moment to make himself heard,

Just one direction, unable to turn.

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My heart told my head she must still be here

here in the house where her life had shaped me.

Yes she would never pass this way again

but my heart told my head that these

markers of a life, the reclining chair

radio, the familiar curtains,

piano I cut my future on

these transient things must be passed on

to the world outside.

My heart would burst though it must ...

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(This is a re-post of a series of five interconnecting poems, previously blogged as separate poems. The death of my mother last year was preceded by hearing the tone poem Finlandia, by Jean Sibelius, on the radio, and it so completely described how I was feeling that it took me over, and informs the whole series.

As a big nod to Sibelius, I decided to use a loosely-based symphonic structure, so...

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The loss of you

The day I lost her, all that she meant
The day I lost her, the day that she went
I cried the loss, of a true friend that day
I cried the loss, when she went away. 
Sadness and sorrow, has broken my heart
Now that you've left us, to sadly depart
Taken to early, just age 43, 
The prime of your life, taken from me,
The world is now grey, the colour has gone
Now you've been...

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                                                             Comes and Goes a Day

            The rim of a hat tilts silently towards me

While a kai-bosh batters my thoughts,

And my head banging wall is dented so violently

And tickles of torture trickle streams of blood;

Fatigue holding tight like a noose from

A snakes ardent enquiry,

            And ther...

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she sits

she knits

the needles click

as strand by strand

in cracked crabbed hands

each stitch

might haul them

back to land

her days, her nights are one, the same -

a gift of darkness borne by grief

to wounds already salted well.

lips taste each quarter

of the wind; she hears the tides

advance, retreat -

as if in echoes from

some  ancient stranded shell.

she feels t...

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