Very early on the morning of November 6th, my grandma passed away peacefully, her wracked, skeletal body stilling and ending eleven months of daily burial.
In the heat of caregiving, when all you can feel is strained muscles, all you can taste is sweat on your upper lip, there is no room for poetry, and the people who sit off to the side in armchairs, seeing the big picture and attempting ameliorating words, feel like clichés.
But when the whistle blows at last and the laborers collapse in a heap, there is a sudden silence. Suddenly, without work to do, your hands twist idly, mind freezes in the cold strange silence, and with long flabby stretches of time and no inclination to industry, then the poetry comes back to usefulness.
I made one CD mix for my car, a jumbled mix of songs that plays in endless circles as I drive. This poetry help to shout down the emptiness, to bring at least rhythm, if not sense, to the cacophonous thoughts. Here are a few of the most played.
Paradise, by Coldplay
Life goes on and gets so heavy
The wheel breaks the butterfly
Every tear a waterfall
In the night, the stormy night, she’d close her eyes
In the night, the stormy night, away she’d fly
And dream of paradise…
Run, by Snow Patrol
Light up, light up
As if you have a choice
Even if you cannot hear my voice
I’ll be right beside you, dear…
Desperado, by The Eagles
Desperado, you ain’t getting any younger
Your pain and your hunger,
They’re driving you home…
In the moment of pain, we screech or grunt without thinking. When it’s quiet and still again, though, there is time to search out words for the shapeless animal howls. Through poetry, our own or others’, we weave severed tendons into a tapestry that bleeds and tells the story of bleeding.
How do you make sense of the senseless? What methods of expression are helpful to you?
Alina Sayre, Author 
Sweety, This is hard to read, but harder not to. Your post helped me see how others’ words can sometimes help give shape to feelings that otherwise lurk like formless shadows that threaten to leap out from dark corners. Gradually giving them shape (with others’ words at first, perhaps later in my own terms): in words, actions, sights, sounds (laughter or tears or roars or sighs or…)somehow puts them inside edges, as the banks of a river keep the river where it is ‘manageable’…high surf instead of a tsunami. Perhaps this is yet another reason why God gave us the Word…? Hugs…
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