She was not a saint, she was not an angel
She was my sister,
She was a mother,
a grandmother,
a cousin and an aunt.
She was loved by us all
and also by others.
She was not a saint, she was not an angel.
God will decide on that,
but she was saintly, and she was angelic
and will always be remembered as that.
How can i mourn something i’ve never known
Still I pretend to swim
in the endless sea
nigh of any true misery
only the discomfort of martyrdom
inflicted upon those who will learn
to forget my name
shroud my shattered remains in gossamer
let time feast on my flesh
strip from me all of value
yield to nothing but my eyes
an unmade carcass of becoming
shall drift loosely carried by the windless tide
watching—waiting for the day to bleed into the night
Grief does not belong here
It has no home
Tears shall not be shed where I lay
Irises will not rest by my tomb
Palms will not dig to unearth me
For a stranger cannot be mourned
If they were never known
Bare minimum?
Yes, I somehow learned to settle for it.
But woe to the debt of sorries I owe to myself.
Woe to the promises I tore up with my own hands.
What a love, so full of sorrow and despair!
Oh, what am I still doing
in a house once filled with love,
now empty?
The love has gone,
but resentment has moved in.
-LilitaWaliWrites??
sweat-soaked
I exhausted countlessly
falling down the nights
throwing myself against
the hollow you left
maybe hurting badly enough
could make you mine again
but now the tide has drawn back
exposing my Sharpie on the sand
you were never something so frightening
as the love of my life
only an amalgamation
of my deepest fears
wearing the face of someone I loved
my foolhardy
but in this one instance
psychic psychosis
twitched my neck
you would be gone
by summer’s end
therefore I swore
enemies with the world
blind to how I was giving you
reason to do the same
I know it selfish now, the way I held on
though that truth sits poorly on my tongue
for I truly believed that every shadow I cast
was shelter for you
I was a child to his suckle
a pallid magro body
unable to bear its own reflection
until he made you his
It begins long before the pen touches the page,
in the quiet habit of noticing what others miss:
the amber morning streaming
through slatted blinds,
the heron lifting up from golden water.
To live this way is not to speak in rhyme,
But to breathe, to watch,
To listen for the rhythm.
It is the tea kettle whistling its low hymn,
Flour dusted across the counter,
The deliberate pace of walking slow enough
To hear what silence carries when it leaves.
You learn that nothing is too small to keep:
A river rock worn smooth by tide,
The wild fire of an evening sky,
The grief you thought would crush you into dirt.
Writing is only the light you bring back.
The poem itself was the breathing,
The wide eyes, the steady pulse,
The courage to face the grain of living
And find in it
A reason to begin again.
The brightest flame is most doomed.
It arrives like clean gravity, sudden.
A flare in the hollow chest,
clockwork chewing the wick of hours.
It makes ruin look like scripture.
It gilds dust, names it heaven.
It teaches the dark to blink,
then laughs porcelain teeth, shattered.
We gather, rugged witnesses, alone,
palms open under ember rain.
We swear it will not vanish.
We speak vows into static walls.
But fire is a feral engine.
It eats its own oxygen, tenderly.
Marvel bleeds; the self is prison.
Release comes bright, then brutal.
O brief seraph of heat,
you governed our pulse with light.
You made the void feel mortal.
You made our names ring, once.
Now ash repeats your outline.
Stillness spins, merciless, patient.
Nothing stops. Nothing starts.
Only a glow, remembering collapse.
Let this elegy hold your flare:
a scream folded inside brightness.
Trust grew fanged, loyalty grew wings.
Then soot, soft mercy closed your mouth.
Same Roof
We shared a roof, a table, the same four walls,
and still I lived on the far side of a door
no one had thought to knock on.
Their voices filled the house each morning,
familiar as the kettle, the taps, the stairs,
and none of it ever reached me.
I was in the room. I was not seen.
You can stand in a doorway for years
and be furniture to the people you love.
They were meant to be the ones who knew me
before I knew myself,
who could read the weather in my face.
Instead I learned to fold my heart small,
to keep it in a pocket
where no one would ask what it weighed.
I have grieved the things that happened.
That grief has edges. It has names and dates.
The other grief has none.
It is the hush where the conversation should have been,
the hand that never reached across,
the people I sat beside for years
and never met.
I was not only mourning what was done to me.
I was mourning the child who kept waiting to be known,
and the closeness
that never had its chance to exist.
The day you left this world
I held you tightly….begged you not to leave
Begged you to come back
Living life without you became a blur
I remember driving my car sobbing ,banging the passenger seat
Screaming “Where are you , over and over”
You always sat there
Pain and sorrow consumed me
It took me seven years before l could look at a photo of you
Talk about you without crying or having to walk away
As the years past l eventually could laugh about the funny times
Your quirky cheeky nature and your hilarious antics
I finally could celebrate the uniqueness, joy and entirety of you
My beloved, extraordinary, sweet mum
I miss you …
I miss you enough to be warm today, my salt- stained pillows would tell you the truth
But the walls around my heartstrings may be made of rocks
So that no one may enter the fortress, you made for me
The fortune you left for me, of your ambitions, your radiance
I drown in melancholy, once in a while, secretly
But I keep finding my way, just like you'd taught me
I keep writing in hopes that you may read, or answer
Maybe talk? Send something from the clouds somehow
I keep writing the same things, I look at the sky
I know you and I, now cross down different paths
Me of life, you of land that never lets you make it back
Land of- I'd give it up in a second to see you smile
I know, i know- I'm foolish, I realize
I lost you to the worst part of time
So when I close my eyes, I see your face
I feel your warmth, your joy, your grace
And I see the light that'd would lead me down
To the roads you said would lead me home
All my what-ifs down the same way, to you
Always towards you.
I was never worth for living on this earth,
I was just a dust particle made to be thrown in the dirt.
I wonder why God would have made such an ugly face and broken Soul,
He must have thought, "Oh, that's the person everyone should ignore".
I genuinely don't know if I'll be alive till I'm 20,
Even if I am my soul would be already empty.
I Really wish I could die soon,I don't want to be a burden on anyone on this earth.
I never really got anyone who can love me,
It felt like an act everyone had to show me .
I hope i die with my thoughts of being happy for once in my lifetime, hoping they contain his little smile.
I don't want anything, I'm just trying to survive.
I live for the days,hoping I'll see his damn smile.
His voice is no longer in my ears, his face is like fading shadow haunting my memories.
Unfortunately I will forget his soul.
I will go back to my younger self again try to be happy in my empty void hole.
Her suffering was her currency as she would trade in sympathies among a band of devils driven wild by their needs to be possessed and to possess in a world seldom fair being built in complications simple heads never seem to ever understand and.
She was Magnificent.
They way she tore me down. Only one other thing had ever hurt me more.
The memories of autumn
when the leaves change
and the cool wind blows
often evolve around family
Picking apples, pumpkin patches,
colors of leaves combining
as my boys jumped in piles raked
together just for that purpose
Before they reached adulthood
and went their own ways
and illness settled in our midst
Autumn represented closeness and hope
While hope still exists, the autumn
breeze doesn't smell like it anymore,
and piles of leaves don't bring laughter
as the empty nest empties the festivities
Independence and death have separated
us from our boys, yet we still have each other
Autumn looks and feels so different, but this
is where hope and love rewrite the script
But the loneliness of Autumns past and joy
that will never come again in those ways
leaves a scar but beautiful memories,
that I choose to embrace and enjoy
A sadistic killer, who enjoys it with relish
A woman desperately in want of love
The age numbers small talk turns to relic
A paedophile never at rest until he gave
A robber on the prowl seeking victims.
Broken hearts need that need mending.
(Written on the 28th May, 2021)
A bundle of nerves tied in a knot as tight and as tangled as eldredge, around my neck, while the fuss of the life around me drowns me to chaos still. I go into waters so deep it gets hard to swim back up. The minuscule parts of my muscle throb and fight my being in a different kind of pain, wanting to be freed. Wanting to run a direction so divergent we may never find our way back home. And yet the longing for a explicit homestead stays.
The head of mine is participation to an all-time war, that only and only asks for my sanity as its reward. Every bone in my body gets the signal through every other fiber, to shut it up!...and yet I can't.
I think about jumping off of very tall somethings, but a voice in my head laughs at my own visions of a certain indiscretion. Like a breed of my own monsters calling out my cowardice. While a soft, warm being hides behind the door forcibly closed with locks too hard for her to open. She knows something I don't.
The volume, pressure, expansion, contraction- nothing works through the cavity. Nothing bleeds for lucidity, only for the curse I cage myself with.
The artist is absent, i guess i killed her off. Built her, just to break her- like a ceramic cup in the decor. A sway and the pieces fall, broken down in chunks of her pain. In the story of everything, the art suffers- tight ship, bad weather- nothing helps. There's no shore to go to. You stay with the wind, flock with the waves like a clueless bird, hoping someday you'll reach a comfort of a place you get to call home. I didn't feed her soul- with words full of love, hate, sad, happy- all she can feel is a hole, in her life where the content used to be. Where the quill-and-ink rested along with a page, ready to be scribbled, ready to be filled with her mind's rage. The ink bleeds once or not at all. It's tiring, having to walk in the spring season, fresh air, new hopes different dreams and yet feeling like the fall.
Every step she takes, every mistake she makes, all the roadblocks that make her feel nothing at all. Carnations over her gazettes, no scriptures, no memories to recall. It has faded into nothing yet she bleeds it somehow. The writer is absent, I think I've killed her off. Clueless in her own world somehow.
Grief Categories
Definition | What is Grief in Poetry?
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Related Poetry Forms
heartache, gloom, melancholy, pain, regret, agony, sorrow, heartbreak, mourning, discomfort, sadness, despair, remorse, bereavement, misery, woe, trouble, anguish, worry, unhappiness, grievance, distress, dole, affliction, harassment