Writing from the Rough: Poems About Grief
Fire and Flood: the poetry of bereavement
Writing poetry about those we have lost to death is a deeply poignant, challenging, experience. It has dangers: it can sharpen grief. And yet – for those of us who write, it is something we may feel compelled to do, not least for the sake of those who have died.
Such writing asks a lot of our hearts. We draw on precious memories, some painful. Bereavement needs time, is intense: it is fire and flood. If the loved one was ill before death, we carry the pain of their decline and its toll on us; if they died suddenly, we carry the shock. Both impact on us physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Just as bereavement needs time, so the writing may need many years; it may never emerge in public. Equally, it may press into being while we are trying to grieve.
I was catalysed into poetry by the sudden death of my father in 1994. At the time, I was staying in a room that faced the raw, north-Devon coastline. Hearing the news, I sat through the night, flame-like, writing and drawing. My self-esteem was too low to call the writing ‘rough poetry’, but a few years later I tidied it into one of my first poems:
the headland
jutting through a breach in time.
The child in me reaching… into the roar
of solar flares and silences where you are (‘Hartland Point’)
More recently – very recently – I lost my mother to pancreatic cancer. It was rapacious (‘not all our love could hold you to this life’). After the nursing and death, I would have liked space to grieve, but poetry (and practical burdens that follow a death) wouldn’t allow it! Images and flashbacks pounded at the door. Writing can heal, but it can also sear. I clung to the hope that I could give something back to my mother by creating some beauty (or at least, a few flickers of beauty) from the ugly realities of her illness.
I began by addressing her:
Kindness in your hands, the nimbus of your hair,
oven-warmed words on the sleet-stung air.
If love could leap the synapses,
the void. To where you are. Or were.
The sequence that grew from this was protean: it went through many shapes, dragging me with it. I wanted to be honest about the cancer. Its disfigurements:
Wipes, medicines: where to begin? A seal’s wail seeps from the bedroom – we run
and its moments of strange dignity:
We are still life, a prayer
We lean and whisper
through your morphine sleep.
I wanted to be true to Mum’s character, trying to joke with the doctors:
‘Another jab? Whoopee!’
and evoke her memory, partly through my childhood:
Nothing can break the bright dream
You pin a sail to the washing-line
Light billows in sheets, soft yellow…
Our poems of bereavement will be different for all of us; different, yet somehow part of one keening, one universal song. For myself, all I know at this stage is that the process deepened my appreciation of my mother, in all her humanity, and the impenetrable nature of death and the spirit:
Love, are you seed or song or flare,
phosphor in windows, fractal?
Intangible, light-tailed, swimming away,
you mermaid into mystery.
Page(s) 25-26
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