Grief
       

I have been grieving for a long time now.
So many of those I loved gone.
I remain behind in a house
that's suddenly too big for me.
I hide out in the back room,
sit in my brown recliner,
the kind I've always hated
because it smacks of illness and old age.

Now, I joke I am having an affair with my chair
with its pillowy, velvet arms, the way
it welcomes me home, the way I fall asleep in it
as though I were a child and it were a cradle.

I have been grieving for a long time now,
wish I could call you all back
and, sometimes, I imagine you are with me,
in my dreams you seem so alive,
you come to comfort me,
though when I wake up, you have vanished.

But I am learning gratitude for another April,
the world in its radiance dancing into spring,
and I am here to greet it,
my arms open, my feet
doing their own quiet dance.

Tweet

Copyright © 2017 Maria Mazziotti Gillan All rights reserved
from What Blooms in Winter
NYQ Books
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission