Tears In A Name
I took your name
And held it between my hands
Thumbs on the soft vowels
Fingers braced against the hard consonants
At first it resisted…
A word is trained to stand upright
To behave…to mean
But grief is stronger than meaning
I squeezed
The letters bent
The silent spaces gave way
From the seams of the syllables
Tears slipped free…
Clear and unpunctuated
Too honest for grammar
They fell onto the page
Where dates usually go
Where facts pretend they can hold a life
I kept pressing
Until your name was no longer pronounceable
Until it was only wet and warm
And shaped like remembering
What was left in my hands
Couldn’t be spoken
But it could be kept
I set it down gently
And let the page dry around it
That’s how I learned…
Some names don’t survive being said
But they live forever
In how they made us weep
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