Author: Christina's Words

“The darkness around us is deep.” ~ William Stafford

“Advice from La Llorona” by Deborah A. Miranda

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry

—a found poem

Each grief has its unique side.
Choose the one that appeals to you.
Go gently.
Your body needs energy to repair the amputation.
Humor phantom pain.
Your brain cells are soaked with salt;
connections fail unexpectedly and often.
Ask for help.
Accept help.
Read your grief like the daily newspaper:
headlines may have information you need.
Scream. Drop-kick the garbage can across the street.
Don’t feel guilty if you have a good time.
Don’t act as if you haven’t been hit by a Mack Truck.
Do things a little differently
but don’t make a lot of changes.
Revel in contradiction.
Talk to the person who died.
Give her a piece of your mind.
Try to touch someone at least once a day.
Approach grief with determination.
Pretend the finish line doesn’t keep receding.
Lean into the pain.
You can’t outrun it.

Deborah A. Miranda, “Advice from La Llorona” from The Zen of La Llorona. Copyright © 2005 by Deborah A. Miranda.

“The Unconscious” by Dennis Saleh

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry

Expect the swollen gorge behind everything.
Expect taking in your hands
at least one of your parents
torn open to reveal what is inside.
Expect your conception, the wall you tear away from,
the dark burst ending nothing.
Plan loss. Plan having no room.
Plan slipping to your knees and fear
welling around your knees rising.
Now find the names for everything.
Now talk at last.
Say, “Choking,” say you are choking,
infancy is choking, childhood is choking,
your body is the throat your blood rushes to
flow from, your body stutters,
now it will never be over.
Realize the rest of your life will be like rain
falling far above you.
Realize Jesus warned you,
realize you’re being lied to,
that at any moment someone will bend to you
and whisper, “I was here you who am I.”

– Dennis Saleh, “The Unconscious,” Poetry (June 1970). 

“Harmony” by Stuart Kestenbaum

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry

You know the Beatles could have
afforded another microphone,

but George would always stand
in the middle and step up to

Paul’s when it was time to
join in. Because that’s the way

harmony is, you need to share the
electricity, the voice, the words.

Just the way we do when we drive
in our cars with the radio on,

the windows rolled down with fall in the
air, dead leaves swirling in the wake,

or in the spring, the earth damp and soft,
the air hazy with pollen. We hear

the song that moves us, crank the
radio and sing along, at the top of

our lungs, as if we just joined
the group. In tune out of tune,

country western, rock and roll, we want
to harmonize. A whole country of

would-be stars losing love, finding love
with the radio in different

cars, on different paths, the dark
road rumbling beneath.

“Harmony” by Stuart Kestenbaum, from Pilgrimage. © Coyote Love Press, 1990.

“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible… (McCarthy)

On By Christina's WordsIn Quote

“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”

“Memoriam” by Anne Michaels

On By Christina's WordsIn Music, Poetry

In lawnchairs under stars. On the dock
at midnight, anchored by winter clothes,
we lean back to read the sky. Your face white
in the womb light, the lake’s electric skin.

Driving home from Lewiston, full and blue, the moon
over one shoulder of highway. There,
or in your kitchen at midnight, sitting anywhere
in the seeping dark, we bury them again and
again under the same luminous thumbprint.

The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.

Their stones are salt and mark where we look back.
Your mother’s hand at the end of an empty sleeve,
scratching at your palm, drawing blood.
Your aunt in a Jewish graveyard in Poland,
her face a permanent fist of pain.
Your first friend, Saul, who died faster than
you could say forgive me.
When I was nine and crying from a dream
you said words that hid my fear.
Above us the family slept on,
mouths open, hands scrolled.
Twenty years later your tears burn the back of my throat.
Memory has a hand in the grave up to the wrist.
Earth crumbles from your fist under the sky’s black sieve.
We are orphaned, one by one.

On the beach at Superior, you found me
where I’d been for hours, cut by the lake’s sharp rim.
You stopped a dozen feet from me.
What passed in that quiet said:
I have nothing to give you.

At dusk, birch forest is a shore of bones.
I’ve pulled stones from the earth’s black pockets,
felt the weight of their weariness – worn,
exhausted from their sleep in the earth.
I’ve written on my skin with their black sweat.

The lake’s slight movement is stilled by fading light.
Soon the stars’ tiny mouths, the moon’s blue mouth.

I have nothing to give you, nothing to carry,
some words to make me less afraid, to say
you gave me this.
Memory insists with its sea voice,
muttering from its bone cave.
Memory wraps us
like the shell wraps the sea.
Nothing to carry,
some stones to fill our pockets,
to give weight to what we have.

Anne Michaels, The Weight of Oranges. Miner’s Pond. McClelland & Stewart (1997)

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“Fear” by Sarah McLachlan