In his poem, “Goodbye,” Geoffrey Brock describes grief in three short stanzas, the second of which is entirely made up of a rhetorical dialogue. Today, write your own meditation on grief. Try using Brock’s form as the “container” for your poem: a few short stanzas, with a middle section in which a question is repeated with different answers given.
Forgiveness makes a monkey out of me
Grief is the beehive I couldn’t remove
from the beams of the my roof.
I’ve been stung. I know exile and displacement
like my tongue knows my saliva.
So, I build a room around the hive.
The bees are free to pursue any flower they fancy.
Are you waiting for an apology?
Like impatient eyes expecting two blue
ticks
on unread WhatsApp messages?
Try again.
Am I waiting for an apology?
Like a daughter watering the roots of a
felled tree?
My heart still beats but my LDL is raised—
despite healthy food, yoga and sort of ideal weight.
The doctor reckons it’s hereditary.
I know it’s the upside-down pineapple cake (your favourite)
I bake everyday but it always burns, gets stuck to the pan's arteries. Maybe,
my thinned-out blood will make it easier
to forgive, to accept my silent, lethal legacy?
Thank you for stopping by and for reading my poems. This photo was taken a while back in the Seychelles.
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