Grief is a savage teacher. You learn there are volumes to pain, and how brutal mourning can be. You come to know the hopeless search for words, a desperation for language to grasp hold of grief and meaning. A dire need for language — for expression.

Who among us has not experienced grief? Felt the complete isolation of it, and in that isolation, reached for words. Poetry is the language of being fully human. When our own words fail us — when condolences are hollow — the language of poetry can help us navigate grief.

I have a collection of poems on Pinterest about grief. The collection started hard and fast at the beginning. I grasped at every word that made me weep, that made my soul cry out, “Yes, I feel this.” I pinned every poem that made the grief howl or simmer, or steady just a little.

Now, the grief comes in tides. Always lingering, sometimes at a distance. Sometimes demanding to be acknowledged. So, I turn to poetry. I write. I read. I sit in nature and watch. Sometimes I stumble upon a perfect composition of words — as if grief wrote them itself. I see grief on the pages before me. The words move me. They move the grief like a dance. A wave. A soaring and diving bird.

I often wonder as I write about grief, if I do it justice. Even now as I write this, I ask myself if I have the right words.

So, when I am in a sea of mourning and look to poetry to sail me through, I often look to Mary Oliver’s words. Here I leave you with her.

Heavy by Mary Oliver

That time
I thought I could not
go any closer to grief
without dying

I went closer,
and I did not die.
Surely God
had his hand in this,

as well as friends.
Still, I was bent,
and my laughter,
as the poet said,

was nowhere to be found.
Then said my friend Daniel,
(brave even among lions),
“It’s not the weight you carry

but how you carry it –
books, bricks, grief –
it’s all in the way
you embrace it, balance it, carry it

when you cannot, and would not,
put it down.”
So I went practicing.
Have you noticed?

Have you heard
the laughter
that comes, now and again,
out of my startled mouth?

How I linger
to admire, admire, admire
the things of this world
that are kind, and maybe

also troubled –
roses in the wind,
the sea geese on the steep waves,
a love
to which there is no reply?

From me to you, with written love.

Zoë x