Poems About Grief
and Letting Go

Grief has more than one address.

We grieve people and places, friendships and futures, the life that almost happened and the selves we once knew by heart. Sometimes grief arrives after loss. Sometimes, impossibly, it arrives before.

These poems from Everything Is Fleeting move through absence, memory and the tender work of letting go.

Impractical Magic

We swore a pact of Impractical Magic,
A bridge of whimsy built across the dark.
To keep our parting from the purely tragic,
We struck the flint to find a spirit-spark.

— “Impractical Magic,” Everything Is Fleeting

Some people leave. Love develops other ways of finding them.

Ghost Seed

I carry a ghost-seed beneath my tongue,
A song of the tissue that never was sung.

I fold up the shadows of almost and soon,
And hide them away in the glow of the moon.
The world sees a woman, composed and serene,
But I am a forest of things left unseen.

— “Ghost Seed,” Everything Is Fleeting

We also grieve what almost was.

BFF (Thief)

So if time’s a thief,
let it be kind,
let it refine your mind.
Let it remove what flatters most, the ties that bind by blind.

— “BFF (Thief),” Everything Is Fleeting

There are goodbyes we mourn, and goodbyes that return us to ourselves.

“Bless the loss. Cut every wire.”

Pride

You exhale the despair to get back to yourself
and pray to the Gods to help lift off this spell.
And then you hear an answer —
My love, open your eyes: it’s you,
You’re the one in disguise.

— “Pride,” Everything Is Fleeting

And then there are the selves we have to lose in order to find ourselves again.

From Le Salon

Anticipated Grief

What about the grief that comes before goodbye?

I wrote Anticipated Grief while sitting with the strange cruelty of loving someone and knowing that love offers no exemption from impermanence. Perhaps this is one of grief’s quietest paradoxes: sometimes the depth of our presence makes us newly conscious of its eventual absence.

“We rehearse absence because we actually feel the price of presence.”

Read Anticipated Grief →

Everything Is Fleeting

Perhaps letting go is another way of loving.

We want permanence because we have loved something enough to want it to stay.

But everything moves. People leave. Friendships change shape. Futures disappear. Old selves loosen their grip. Even grief, eventually, becomes something different from what it was when it first arrived.

Everything Is Fleeting lives inside that impermanence, asking us to meet what is here while it is here, and to feel it fully enough that when the tide turns, we can loosen our hands.

“What version of yourself have you been quietly grieving?”

— from 7 Days of Presence, Everything Is Fleeting

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