from "Waiting for God" by Simone Weil

---from Letter 6, Last Thoughts

"God's mercy is manifest in affliction as in joy, by the same right, more perhaps, because under this form, it has no human analogy. Man's mercy is only shown in giving joy, or maybe in inflicting pain with a view to outward results, bodily healing or education. But it is not the outward results of affliction that bear witness to divine mercy. The outward results of true affliction are nearly always bad. We lie when we try to disguise this. It is in affliction itself that the splendor of God's mercy shines, from its very depths, in the heart of its inconsolable bitterness. If still persevering in our love, we fall to the point where the soul cannot keep back the cry "My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" if we remain at this point without ceasing to love, we end by touching something that is not affliction, not joy, something that is the central essence, necessary and pure, something not of the senses, common to joy and sorrow: the very love of God...

The knowledge of this presence of God does not afford consolation; it takes nothing from the fearful bitterness of affliction; nor does it heal the mutilation of the soul. But we know quite certainly that God's love for us is the very substance of this bitterness and this mutilation."

grief card 27

---art and prompt by Michelle Lynn Dyrness, Working with Fragments

I can make myself wake

into sleep paralysis, descending first

a stair in my consciousness

as my body relaxes, walking

and walking through corridors

and train platforms until I see a hooded

figure into whose face I find my waking

paralyzed, who has grown

more and more unavoidable,

whose face like the first orphaned

poem I daily turn exactly

oblique to.

grief card 41

---art by Julia Terry, prompt by National Hospice Cooperative, Simple Grief Prompts for Children (and Adults)

I feel relieved that

            infants can be made up of up to 85% water...

I'm learning to

            break the water of Christmas...

I'm letting go of

            the olive shoot in my beak...

Three people who understand my grief are

            the one east of Eden,

            the swallowed prophet,

            the one who weeps...

I hope

            in the gifts of these magi...

In order to heal, I need

            gills, fins, and scales...

I comfort myself by

            swimming in the belly of the night...

At night I think about

            how water cannot be watered down...

I secretly

            am a pillar of salt...

I feel the loss mostly when

            I thirst...

When I'm alone,

            I miss...

I look forward to

            hosting glistening light...

The loss has changed the way

            morning arrives, inconsolably glorious.

grief card 48

---art by Molly Koehn, prompt by NHC, Living with Loneliness

You keep company with silence.

A word breaks into a world

no one can promise is not pain.

It could have been flower or laughter.

For you, a hollowing,

a scraped and carved cavern

where you turned into your echo, sound

of a sound. No one knew

you were missing,

which is the loneliest kind of loss,

how I did not know I'd given up on repair

until I heard the word darn. 

You have a name as mountainous,

as claimed, and as is.

[Choiceless in the waking]

Choiceless in the waking,

The awakened can now

To anything apply.

Like a birth or being

Raised from the dead,

After the miracle

Is the pain, involuntary

Breath, the decision

To lie in unbelief

Or come out stretching.

Everything is Plundered

---Anna Akhmatova, translated by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward

Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold,

Death's great black wing scrapes the air,

Misery gnaws to the bone.

Why they do we not despair?

By day, from the surrounding woods,

cherries blow summer into town;

at night the deep transparent skies

glitter with new galaxies.

And the miraculous comes so close

to the ruined, dirty houses–

something not known to anyone at all,

but wild in our breast for centuries.

I Never Wanted to Die

---Dorianne Laux

It's the best part of the day, morning light sliding

down rooftops, treetops, the birds pulling themselves

up out of whatever stupor darkened their wings,

night still in their throats.

I never wanted to die. Even when those I loved

died around me, away from me, beyond me.

My life was never in question, if for no other reason

than I wanted to wake up and see what happened next.

And I continue to want to open like that, like the flowers

who lift their heavy heads as the hills outside the window

flare gold for a moment before they turn

on their sides and bare their creased backs.

Even the cut flowers in a jar of water lift

their soon to be dead heads and open

their eyes, even they want a few more sips,

to dwell here, in paradise, a few days longer.

grief card 56

---art by Jessica Palomo, prompt by Kyle Nolla, Connecting with the Body

The rite of birth

was smooth enough

if you didn't count

the episiotomy.

My poor cut mother.

Unnoticeable

even later

was my misshapen right

hemisphere.

Ear half-formed-

enough to pass

but not hear,

gravy-boat smile

left-lilted and

half-a-full cup,

hand to smaller

hand in prayer,

right leaning

gait a constant

veer. A testes

enough, per doctor,

to be a father.

God my Father

was by my pierced

right side,

a herniated

birthright:

to want right

at the body's 

letting me go.

My mother who wants

me to smile more,

this sign of the living's

righteousness,

can't not smile

at the most sutured

day, the most

crushed God,

the most right

now we have.

grief card 19

--- art and prompt by Jennifer Sargent, The Texture of Memory

The saplings I transplanted in the ground –

Snow Queen nectarine, May Pride Peach, Blood Orange –

are blooming already. But I must nip

the buds to prevent fruit, forestall their sweet

promise, deny the bees and butterflies

their co-labor. These nubs of barrenness

hope bears, but growth is in the damp dark earth.

At birth, my gut protruded, hernia

that blossomed petals and petals of pain. 

When each cry flowered, silence grew in me

a tenebrous and promissory root,

made me hope, laden and verdant with hope.

Collect #10

To Jonah, whose heart the Assyrians shattered

while God did math about who deserved what.

Fling your deep into my deep, keep my grief

from bitterness, contention from rebellion,

tell me that in forty days, mine will be sweet

of God's ruthless grace, the riches of his love

that slowly outlasts his heavy wrath.

Amen.