Praise
Grief
It is an earthquake which begins so far under
that you can’t even imagine it, until you do.
The ground of sandboxes and sidewalks --
so blissfully unquestioned -- shifts, quivers,
until rumbling, it lurches, breaks apart,
and crashes everything on top of you.
Pinned in the rubble, you cannot escape --
trapped by what was once your comfort.
There is no soft hand.
There is no gentle reassuring voice.
No one hears you, and even so,
why.
When much later you are dug out,
you wish they hadn’t.
Then come
the aftershocks.
When the resulting tsunami begins,
it does so by waters first receding gently,
lulling you into more false security.
Still at sea, the wave is small, unremarkable,
until it gets closer, shallower, building.
When it crashes in, overwhelmingly,
inundating, obliterating, it keeps coming.
After more of a long time, if for some reason
you’re still around, you are washed up
with more nothing. Gasping, battered,
lost, you pull yourself out alone,
to walk away somewhere, drenched,
with damp decomposing memories
seemingly from someone else’s life,
dragged dripping now
into your new one.
-Janet Stebbins