Two Poems from 1986

1986 was the year Patrick was born.
When Patrick nursed, he would stare into my eyes, as babies do when they are eating. And I remember that his eyes had extraordinary specks and dots of colors and I felt I could just float away into them....it makes me happy to remember those precious moments of communion.


The Sky of Patrick's Eyes

Baby, peering into the blue
clarity of your eyes
is to rise
from gravity,
slide right through
the glassy stratosphere
of your tears
into a pure beyond
where secret dark flecks
ride the black hubs of iris,
spinning out like galaxies
to the far rim of universe,
new star fields,
wheels of other
constellations.


1986 was also the year my father died, when Patrick was 7 months old. My father was the first person to call Patrick "Patty" - the nickname his friends in high school had for him, although I think my father thought of it with the Irish spelling "Paddy." I wrote numerous poems about the loss of my father, but this one could have been written today...about the loss of Patrick....grief is...grief.


Riding the Wind of Sorrow

Grief takes you soaring
alone and unshielded
over the absent world.
Awake or dreaming, you must go
without maps, brave with mourning,
the wind singing in the maze
of your bones.
You weep in the dawn of new physics.
Loosened from linear time,
the demands of gravity and paradox,
you see old selves playing
forever together
and forgotten words are loud,
drumbeats on the blue
skin of the sky.

Descending too fast,
weighted by the sudden stone
of your heart,
you are confronted with love
that electrifies you.
His face draws close as breath.
Each freckle is luminous,
every gesture alive.
You stare right into the radiant center
of loss, astonished by faith,
your sorrow defied.
You stare until his hands move gently,
soft shadows crossing over
the sad new moons
of your eyes.

Today insists on being difficult and full of sad.
A friend told me about a book called The Hole in Me Since the Day You Died. It's a beautiful book of art done by seven people, as part of a counseling program using art for grief therapy. I've only been able to look at the work of one person so far (a man who lost his 20 year old daughter in a drunk driving accident), as it is so powerfully evocative of the emotions and feelings I have been experiencing that it's just too intense to look at more right now.
I've also begun to try to express my own feelings in a similar way, in a Moleskine drawing notebook. Pen and ink, watercolor, collage....I'm using them all.
Art heals.

Namaste,
'Zann