Of Grief

Isn’t it an ocean?
Full. Expansive. Mysterious. Breathing.

This feeling.

Rushing and slow

Older and longer than
all of our lives linked
and added together.

I sit at its edge. It swells and I can’t move.
How it drags me under. There is no fighting back,
It’s hands are relentless and reach far.

I am pushed from old shores to new land searching for who I lost.

(Have they become sea grass, shells, salt, sand
The blanket of sky that covers me?
The ants marching along? The silent crab eyeing me?
The light against my skin?)

Have they found the other side of home?

Isn’t this an ocean, friends?
How it crashes into everything we trust and “know”.
How it overflows and proves that our hearts don’t know boundaries of body, space, and time.

How it reminds us of how big and small we each are.

In a single day I may wade through, surf, tread, swim, float.
In a minute, I may drown.
The next, I may be lifted up.

Isn’t it an ocean?
How it engulfs us, pulls us under, and at the same time through.

How we are carried back from the edge, layed out on the ground, and washed.

Covered in scrapes and grit. And washed over.

How we are pulled through the cycles of Life again and again?