From hiatus, this grief energizes

I’m doom-scrolling—this new word trending in the pandemic—and crying, then laughing, then crying. Folks have lost folks. Folks are warning others to not avoid the body’s clues for mortality—disease. In the isolation from society, I have begun to write again. Poems exploring grief. Poems exploring the same subjects of grief that have permeated my life since childhood. Poems that brought me back to my own losses.

I still understand very little about grief in the hundreds of poems I’ve written about grief, but my internal being compels me to write about it. Perhaps my soul is exhausted with me not breaking through, accepting what we all know death means. The end of our knowledge brings fear. The end of our knowledge brings hope. When we die, will those left make the most of their life left. When we die, will our soul have sentience in some ethereal realm. If our soul dissipates into the earthly atmosphere, for what purpose was it all. There has to be a creator, or else we would not be have the power to create. Something came before us, and what sense does it make that this creator was unconscious in its intention.

A mirror in a mirror in a mirror: the creator of it all remains the mystery. We have mimicked this in our mythologies. The Greek Gods had parents, Titans. Who is God’s parents in Christianity? In religion, we move ourselves one step closer to our Gods, but are they the ultimate creators, or merely the distance humans can reach? There’s a randomness to life and death on earth, and we write about it every day. We understand the surface of grief; we understand the necessity of moving through it to our own ends. Yet, like so many words, the repetition of grief turns the word into doubt. Is that how you spell it? Is that how it’s pronounced?

I’ve written dozens of poems in the year of the pandemic. I’d like to write of tenderness, of happiness, but the isolation, the perpetual sickness, all turn back to this word. Grief is the first atom.