When I wrote Grief, I wasn’t trying to be poetic. I was trying to be honest about how grief has lived inside me over the years.
I have lost lovers, a father, siblings, and friends, and I have often struggled to articulate what that loss felt like beyond the expected language of sadness.
For me, grief went bone deep. It settled into the marrow of my bones and stayed there, sometimes quiet but present, and other times so loud it drowned out everything else.
It was not always visible to the outside world, and it did not always look like tears. Often, it felt like weight — something sitting on the chest, something tightening in the stomach, something looping through the mind without rest.
There were times when the grief for my father felt as though it would eat me whole. I missed him so much it felt physical. The absence was not abstract; it had shape and weight.
What I came to understand is that grief does not truly go away. It changes shape, it softens at times, it becomes less sharp, but it remains.
It can feel like a constant companion — not always loud, but never entirely absent. Time does not erase it; it simply teaches us how to carry it differently.
I do not think we ever truly recover from grief. I think it sits beside us because it mattered — because those people mattered. It does not stay to punish us; it stays because love does not simply disappear.
Writing this poem was my way of giving that physical, persistent presence a voice. I wanted to express how grief can live in the body before it ever finds language, how it can exist beneath the surface of an otherwise ordinary day.
At its heart, the poem reflects a truth I have come to accept: grief is love with nowhere to go. It stays because something — or someone — mattered deeply enough to leave an imprint.
And perhaps that lingering presence is not a flaw in us, but a testament to the depth of what we felt.
Thank you for reading
Your DislexicPoet 🖤