Building in the Dark
Grief unfolds
while watching fireworks
Is the photographer
at family portraits
Asks if you're asleep yet
in the dead of night.
And because grief comes to you
invisible, and in secret
in the most silent of rooms
in the most sunlit of moments
Perhaps gifts in grief,
must come as gently, too.
Gifts with play.
Gifts with a choice.
Gifts with safe passage.
Even the grieving
do not always know what to say
to the newly grieved.
Maybe the right words
are not what we ask for.
But to build,
piece by piece until
we are no longer gasping
for air.
Maybe you offer
cedar or pine
an anchor
or a sail.
We never know,
which piece
will bring us to shore
when we are building in the dark,
in which breath
we will finally feel
the sun again,
when we were never sailors
to begin with.
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