In that room
Sometimes we need time to breathe — to do SOMETHING (just one thing) that diverts us from our grieving. Today I went to breakfast by myself and journaled. This while Dan slept in. It was a wonderfully bright and bracing day, as often winter is. I walk down those streets every day. In the time it took to walk down a city block, I remembered spring time and the dogwoods in bloom, the children sprawled out on the library lawn in summer and the brilliant falling leaves of autumn.
Here’s the first draft of the poem I wrote after I attended the first bereaved parents support group last year.
In that room
Where the hollowed out parents meet
The heater clicks and whirs to soothe their shivering
In that bare echoing room in the library basement,
The mothers and fathers crowd around conference tables pushed together
And huddle about their aborted jobs
Of seeing to adulthood those once bright hopes that were theirs
Their children, taken from them
Too young–always too young, whatever the age.
Someone passes the Kleenex around the table.
Another offers a tattered photo album
And between the sniffles and the heartache,
The stories. Of the now dead. Graduations,
Beliefs, desires. And too, the coping.
They hug and shake hands, strangers come together
To find out who else among the living share their scars.
Now banded together by their grief, the rise and exit the room
Which held them, warm and into the bracing endless night.
Tags: Poems, Vigil for Akira