She Is

I love the family rituals and togetherness of the holidays. However, it can also be a time when we feel absence most keenly. Sometimes the hardest time is once others return to work and school and we struggle with finding a “new normal”. If you are living with grief right now, I wish you peace and comfort. I wrote this poem for a family member, and myself, during a period of loss.

Tribute (For Poppa)

I don’t know what you believe about lives and the long

long after, when our moment is done we join the ones

we lost perhaps in some next place or become part

of the “everything-in-one”. 

Wherever minds go – somewhere, nowhere – 

we leave behind bones and neurones, and the sadness

of cellular silence. No more busy replicating the pattern

in them unique to her, slowly unravelling.

A sacred code repeated in the gesture of a sister’s hand 

in the twinkling of a brother’s eye a pattern memorised

safely held in your heart as you go on. I don’t know 

if there is memory in a soul but the atomic travels of us 

we can imagine. Parts of her rejoin the earth a joyous 

homecoming to quench the thirst of trees that feed 

the Tui, the Chamois and the Tahr.

Where is she now? Particles of her rise to fill clouds

elements of her penetrate the gates of atmospheres 

populate other worlds, warm under other suns, 

older and newer to be spun through black holes 

matter collapsing and exploding again, again 

as radiant supernovas burning bright in the night 

skies of a thousand galaxies.

Perhaps the quarks of her small enough slip

through weaves in fabrics of time and parts 

of her play in past, present, future all at once

and she is already in the buds, the sepals and hips 

of generous perfumed blooms of summer and their 

fountains of colour she is in the velvet garden faces 

of the cool months in their yellow violet petals five 

she is alive as the Sunny Boy and the Moon Moth

Where is she now my lost love? we ask, the tensions 

of bodily form come undone, parts of her in the leaves 

and the snow, echoes in the deeds of those who hold 

her close as she joins with her own elders, ancestors, 

molecules unpinned from boundaries of time – she is 

in every moment all at once.

Hold your hand open to the air

feel the aliveness, she dances there

she is the trees she is the rain she is the stars

she is

and she is safe –

in the repeating patterns, of our saddened hearts.