Fallen Poem

Photo by Mike Labrum on Unsplash

We are past the age of passionate responses
to political questions. My husband and I propose
nothing so much as why or how. We don’t seek
answers. After the internationally renowned researcher said,
We may never know the cause, we took his words
and fed them to the fire with what ifs, with stalks of lavender,
holy basil, and lemongrass. Incense for the lost, for the light
we will always find ways to honor. Our home
now a temple to our lost son. Our backyard bonfires.
Our conversations quilt hope and resignation,
fight and release. The world is full of and, every thing
lives with its opposite. All of it held in the heart,
now so full, now so wrecked, it seems like a done for thing.
But dying of a broken heart is cliché, and we refuse
its eroding, melancholy facade. Yes, grief is a kind of exile.
Yes, the pain lodges in muscle and bone, drenches every cell.
A week after my son passed, my legs seized with an ache
so deep as if I had walked a year without stopping,
every muscle spasmed and short-circuited. I asked him
to release the physical pain, to lift it from my body, and he did.
I understand how pain can fester, becoming its own
righteous convention. The pain. My pain. Our pain.
It becomes a pet that hops onto your seat, steals
your meatballs and everything that could heal you.
My oh mine. We travel, we find new mountains
to climb, we move our bodies until we exhaust them.
In this, we expand our bandwidth. And the heart finds
its way through the debris and pushes us back into life.
And we—the hologram of us, the story we’re creating
between end points—scramble up to the vista, and drink.