I cry and break down a lot I lie and say I'm okay when I'm really not I reminisce and look at my wrist at all the scars I've got When you took my mother at 10 months the heartache started God bless the souls of ALL the dearly departed Please tell me is my child up there?

Stages of Grief
by Joan Leotta
 
The first week
My world is spinning
"That's nothing, the world always spins,"
 they tell me.
"They" always know best.
Their world is fixed
on its axis, firm and sure
Mine has lost its axis,
whirling and twirling
out into space,
out of control.
I am oblivious to all but my loss.
 
Three months after
I am quiet
when I used to laugh
Sad
when I used to be pensive
Still awake
Late into the night
Talking to a picture,

The stairway sits empty
In silent echoes from yesterday
When so much
Filled the halls, darkly,
Like a performance at Carnegie Hall
After all the music dies
On one cacophonous note

I left the cemetery that April day And drove to the old farmhouse Where I’d grown up. Dead leaves shattered As I walked around the house I hadn’t seen in twenty years The tree branch that had held the rope swing, The grassy space by the woods where I’d played… Still there. The trees, just beginning to show new leaves Let more light reach the ground than under summer’s Dense canopy of green Broken beer bottles, left by hunters, I guessed, lent sparks of light To the dried leaves that had piled up for years Shards of broken glass hung from the frame Of my old bedroom window Paint had worn

Many years ago, this day,
As lingering clouds
Brought out the morning rays,
I heard the east wind drown
In the sound of the ocean spray.
 
She came in nightly
On a foaming swell,
Lady floating lightly
On a seaborne shell.
 
“Oh bury me not
In the deep blue sea;
Oh bury me not
Where the cold wind flees.”
 
I carried her home
For miles and miles . . .
If only I’d known
It was just for a while.
 
The words unsaid, undone—
Gone before our time had run.
 
The whispers ceased