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Poetry

Guiding Voices

Poetry was a vital component of my own healing, and I am deeply grateful for the guiding voices of the many poets, alive and dead, who held me, reassured me, reminded me, and inspired me along my path. A good poem engages both the seen and the unseen, feelings and thoughts, and speaks to where you are in a way that isn’t as accessible through daily language. A good poem can also hold the vision of the future when your own eyes cannot see very far.

Choose a poem as a healing tincture for a period of time and take it deeply into yourself by printing it out, putting it on your phone, reading it daily, and perhaps even committing it to memory.

I have copied excerpts from some of the most powerful poems for me in my journey across the brutal landscape of loss. If the poem resonates with you I recommend reading the entire poem.

I have divided the page into three sections
for poems that I found helpful at different phases.

Descent

The initial shock and disorientation that occurs at the beginning of a meaningful loss.

Initiation

The hard and transformational path we must walk across the barren landscape of loss.

Return

The time when we called to return to the world and discover that we now have eyes that can see in the dark.

Descent

Traveler, your footprints

Antonio Machado

Traveler your footprints
are the only road, nothing else.
Traveler, there is no road;
you make your own path as you walk.
As you walk, you make your own road,
and when you look back
you see the path
you will never travel again.
Traveler, there is no road;
only a ship’s wake on the sea.

The Layers

Abridged
Stanley Kunitz

In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

Read full poem

Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower

Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Joanna Macy

Listen
Quiet friend who has come so far,

feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

From Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29

What to Do in the Darkness

Marilyn McEntyre

Go slowly
Consent to it
But don’t wallow in it
Know it as a place of germination
And growth
Remember the light
Take an outstretched hand if you find one
Exercise unused senses

Find the path by walking it
Practice trust
Watch for dawn

The Prayers

Abridged
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

When I asked the world to open me,
I had not imagined drowning
was the way to reach the shore.
The waves of sorrow dragged me down
with their tides of unthinkable loss.
The currents emptied my pockets
and stripped me of my ideas.
I was rolled and eroded
and washed up on the sand
like driftwood—softened.
I sprawled there and wept,
astonished to still be alive.
It is not easy to continue to pray this way.
Open me.
And yet it is the truest prayer I know.
The other truest prayer,
though sometimes it frightens me,
is Thank you.

Talking to Grief

Denise Levertov

Ah, grief, I should not treat you
like a homeless dog
who comes to the back door
for a crust, for a meatless bone.
I should trust you.

I should coax you
into the house and give you
your own corner,
a worn mat to lie on,
your own water dish.

You think I don’t know you’ve been living
under my porch.
You long for your real place to be readied
before winter comes. You need
your name,
your collar and tag. You need
the right to warn off intruders,
to consider my house your own
and me your person
and yourself
my own dog.

From Poems 1972-1982

Into A Larger Existence

Rabindranath Tagore

Peace, my heart, let the time
for parting be sweet.

Let it not be a death but
completeness.

Let love melt into memory
and pain into songs.

Let the flight through the
sky end in the folding of the
wings over the nest.

Let the last touch of your
hands be gentle like the
flowers of the night.

Stand still.
O Beautiful End,
for a moment,
and say your last words
in silence.

I bow to you and hold up my lamp
to light you on your way.

Three Things

Mary Oliver

To live in this world
You must be able
To do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

Grief

Louise Erdrich

Sometimes you have to take your own hand
as though you were a lost child
and bring yourself stumbling
home over twisted ice.

Whiteness drifts over your house.
A page of warm light
falls steady from the open door.

Here is your bed, folded open.
Lie down, lie down, let the blue snow cover you.

I had been sad for so long that it shocked me

Ruth L. Schwartz

the enormous yellow moon
balanced like a honeydew

on the hill’s knife-edge,
fat and implacable.

It wavered there as long as it could,
then started—and who can blame it—

its slow slide.
As if it meant to show me what was missing.

As if the world were asking, Will you learn
to stand beside this pain?

No, I said,
I wish it dead.

I said no. But the world
said yes.

For Grief

Abridged
John O’Donohue

When you lose someone you love,
Your life becomes strange,
The ground beneath you becomes fragile,
Your thoughts make your eyes unsure;
And some dead echo drags your voice down
Where words have no confidence
Your heart has grown heavy with loss;
And though this loss has wounded others too,
No one knows what has been taken from you
When the silence of absence deepens.

Read full poem

Blessing

John O’Donohue

On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.

And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets into you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green
and azure blue,
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.

Read full poem

To Know the Dark

Wendell Berry

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

Grief as a Shipwreck

Anonymous

‘(As) for grief, you’ll find it comes in waves. When the ship is first wrecked, you’re drowning, with wreckage all around you. Everything floating around you reminds you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that was, and is no more. And all you can do is float. You find some piece of the wreckage and you hang on for a while. Maybe it’s some physical thing. Maybe it’s a happy memory or a photograph. Maybe it’s a person who is also floating. For a while, all you can do is float. Stay alive.

In the beginning, the waves are 100 feet tall and crash over you without mercy. They come 10 seconds apart and don’t even give you time to catch your breath. All you can do is hang on and float. After a while, maybe weeks, maybe months, you’ll find the waves are still 100 feet tall, but they come further apart. When they come, they still crash all over you and wipe you out. But in between, you can breathe, you can function. You never know what’s going to trigger the grief. It might be a song, a picture, a street intersection, the smell of a cup of coffee. It can be just about anything…and the wave comes crashing. But in between waves, there is life.

Somewhere down the line, and it’s different for everybody, you find that the waves are only 80 feet tall. Or 50 feet tall. And while they still come, they come further apart. You can see them coming. An anniversary, a birthday, or Christmas, or landing at O’Hare. You can see it coming, for the most part, and prepare yourself. And when it washes over you, you know that somehow you will, again, come out the other side. Soaking wet, sputtering, still hanging on to some tiny piece of the wreckage, but you’ll come out.

Take it from an old guy. The waves never stop coming, and somehow you don’t really want them to. But you learn that you’ll survive them. And other waves will come. And you’ll survive them too…’

Untitled [Grief will come to you]

by Gregory Orr.

Grief will come to you.
Grip and cling all you want,
It makes no difference.

Catastrophe? It’s just waiting to happen.
Loss? You can be certain of it.

Flow and swirl of the world.
Carried along as if by a dark current.

All you can do is keep swimming;
All you can do is keep singing.

From How Beautiful the Beloved

The Sacred Life

Sherrie Lovler

There comes a time
when you want to run.
Run as far away as you can.
Run from your life.
Run from the task
that is so large
it cannot be done.
But your feet don’t move.
And slowly
life opens up
and help appears.
Not in the form you expect
but in secrets
and winding roads
and gateways into
the world you long for
but don’t know how to reach.
And the task
doesn’t get easier
but life gets more beautiful
with a richness
you couldn’t imagine
and a warmth
you had never felt
As you directly face
the immensity
of what you are
called to do.

How to Climb a Mountain

Maya Stein

Make no mistake. This will be an exercise in staying vertical.
Yes, there will be a view, later, a wide swath of open sky,
but in the meantime: tree and stone. If you’re lucky, a hawk will
coast overhead, scanning the forest floor. If you’re lucky,
a set of wildflowers will keep you cheerful. Mostly, though,
a steady sweat, your heart fluttering indelicately, a solid ache
perforating your calves. This is called work, what you will come to know,
eventually and simply, as movement, as all the evidence you need to make
your way. Forget where you were. That story is no longer true.
Level your gaze to the trail you’re on, and even the dark won’t stop you.

​​Sweet Darkness

David Whyte

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

A Great Need

Hafiz

Out
Of a great need
We are all holding hands
And climbing.
Not loving is a letting go.
Listen,
The terrain around here
Is
Far too
Dangerous
For
That.

“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.”

Elisabeth Kubler – Ross

Cutting Loose

William Stafford

Sometimes from sorrow, for no reason,
you sing. For no reason, you accept
the way of being lost, cutting loose from
all else and electing a world
where you go where you want to.

Arbitrary, sound comes, a reminder
that a steady center is holding
all else. If you listen, that sound
will tell where it is, and you
can slide your way past trouble.

Certain twisted monsters
always bar the path—but that’s when
you get going best, glad to be
lost, learning how real it is
here on the earth, again and again.

FINISTERRE

David Whyte

The road in the end taking the path the sun had taken,
into the western sea, and the moon rising behind you
as you stood where ground turned to ocean: no way
to your future now
but the way your shadow could take,
walking before you across water,
going where shadows go,
no way to make sense of a world
that wouldn’t let you pass
except to call an end to the way you had come,
to take out each frayed letter you had brought
and light their illumined corners, and to read
them as they drifted through the western light;
to empty your bags; to sort this and to leave that;
to promise what you needed to promise all along,
and to abandon the shoes that brought you here
right at the water’s edge,
not because you had given up
but because now,
you would find a different way to tread,
and because, through it all,
part of you would still walk on,
no matter how, over the waves.

To share with someone going through a loss
For a Time of Sorrow

Howard Thurman

I share with you the agony of your grief,
The anguish of your heart finds echo in my own.
I know I cannot enter all you feel
Nor bear with you the burden of your pain;
I can but offer what my love does give:
The strength of caring,
The warmth of one who seeks to understand
The silent storm-swept barrenness of so great a loss.
This I do in quiet ways,
That on your lonely path
You may not walk alone.

Growing Light

George Ella Lyon

I write this poem
out of darkness
to you
who are also in darkness
because our lives demand it.

This poem is a hand on your shoulder
a bone touch to go with you
through the hard birth of vision.
In other words, love
shapes this poem
is the fist that holds the chisel,
muscle that drags marble
and burns with the weight
of believing a face
lives in the stone
a breathing word in the body.

I tell you
though the darkness
has been ours
words will give us
give our eyes, opened in promise
a growing light.

For Friends and Family of a Suicide

John O’Donohue

As you huddle around the torn silence,
Each by this lonely deed exiled
To a solitary confinement of soul,
May some small glow from what as been lost
Return like the kindness of candlelight.
As your eyes strain to sift
This sudden wall of dark
And no one can say why
In such a forsaken, secret way,
This death was sent for…
May one of the lovely hours
Of memory return
Like a field of ease
Among these graveled days.
May the Angel of Wisdom
Enter this ruin of absence
And guide your minds
To receive this bitter chalice
So that you do not damage yourselves
By attending only at the hungry altar
Of regret and anger and guilt.
May you be given some inkling
That there could be something else at work
And that what to you now seems
Dark, destructive, and forlorn,
Might be a destiny that looks different
From inside the eternal script.
May vision be granted to you
To see this with the eyes of providence.
May your loss become a sanctuary
Where new presence will dwell
To refine and enrich
The rest of your life
With courage and compassion.
And may your lost loved one
Enter into the beauty of eternal tranquility,
In that place where there is no more sorrow
Or separation or mourning or tears.

For the Sake of Strangers

Dorianne Laux

No matter what the grief, its weight,
we are obliged to carry it.
We rise and gather momentum, the dull strength
that pushes us through crowds.
And then the young boy gives me directions
so avidly. A woman holds the glass door open,
waiting patiently for my empty body to pass through.
All day it continues, each kindness
reaching toward another—a stranger
singing to no one as I pass on the path, trees
offering their blossoms, a retarded child
who lifts his almond eyes and smiles.
Somehow they always find me, seem even
to be waiting, determined to keep me
from myself, from the thing that calls to me
as it must have once called to them—
this temptation to step off the edge
and fall weightless, away from the world.

What We Carry. © BOA Editions, 1994.

TRUST

Rilke

You know that the flower
Bends when the wind
Wants it to, and you
Must become like that – –
That is, Filled with
Deep Trust.

I love the dark hours of my being.

Rainier Marie Rilke

I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.

Then the knowing comes:
I can open to another life that’s wide and timeless.

Heavy

Mary Oliver

That time
I thought I could not
go any closer to grief
without dying.

I went closer,
and I did not die.
Surely God
had His hand in this,

as well as friends.
Still I was bent,
and my laughter,
as the poet said,

was nowhere to be found.
Then said my friend Daniel
(brave even among lions),
“It is not the weight you carry

but how you carry it—
books, bricks, grief—
it’s all in the way
you embrace it, balance it, carry it

when you cannot, and would not,
put it down.”
So I went practicing.
Have you noticed?

Have you heard
the laughter
that comes, now and again,
out of my startled mouth?

How I linger
to admire, admire
the things of this world
that are kind and maybe

also troubled—
roses in the wind,
The sea geese on the steep waves,
a love
to which there is no reply?

Thirst: Poems by Mary Oliver

Not the Loss Alone

Gregory Orr

Not the loss alone,
But what comes after.
If it ended completely
At loss, the rest
Wouldn’t matter.

But you go on.
And the world also.

And words, words
In a poem or song:
Aren’t they a stream
On which your feelings float?

Aren’t they also
The banks of that stream
And you yourself the flowing?

Sink, So As To Rise

Leon Wieseltier, Kaddish
(Mourners say Kaddish to show that despite loss they still praise God.)

There are circumstances that must shatter you,
and if you are not shattered, then you have not understood your circumstances.
In such circumstances, it is failure for your heart not to break.
And it is pointless to put up a fight, for a fight will blind you to the opportunity that has been presented by your misfortune.
Do you wish to persevere pridefully in the old life?
Of course you do; the old life was a good life.
But it is no longer available to you.
It has been carried away, irreversibly.
So there is only one thing to be done.
Transformation must be met with transformation.
Where there was the old life, let there be the new life.
Do not persevere.
Dignify the shock.
Sink, so as to rise.

SOLACE

Abridged
David Whyte

Solace is the art of asking the beautiful question, of our selves; of our world or of one another. In fiercely difficult and un-beautiful moments. Solace is what we must look for when the mind cannot bear the pain, the loss or the suffering that eventually touches every life and every endeavor; when longing does not come to fruition in a form we can recognize, when people we love disappear, when hope must take a different form than the one we have shaped for it.

― David Whyte, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

Read full poem

Initiation

Return

Getting There

Abridged
David Waggoner

You take a final step and, look, suddenly
You’re there. You’ve arrived
At the one place all your drudgery was aimed for:
This common ground
Where you stretch out, pressing your cheek to sandstone.
…
You’ve earned this worn-down, hard, incredible sight
Called Here and Now.
Now, what you make of it means everything,
Means starting over:
The life in your hands is neither here nor there
But getting there,
So you’re standing again and breathing, beginning another
Journey without regret
Forever, being your own unpeaceable kingdom,
The end of endings.

From: Traveling Light: Collected and New Poems

Read full poem

If Deepest Grief is Hell

Gregory Orr

If deepest grief is hell,
When the animal self
Wants to lie down
In the dark and die also. . .

If deepest grief is hell,
Then the world returning
(Not soon, not easily)
Must be heaven.

The joke you laughed at
Must be heaven
Or the funny thing
The cat did
At its food dish.

Whatever
Guides you back
To the world.

That dark so deep
The tiniest light
Will do.

From: Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved

Kindness

Naomi Shihab Ny

Before you know kindness
as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow
as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness
that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day
to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.

Loss

Rumi

Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror
up to where you’re bravely working.

Expecting the worst, you look, you look, and instead,
here’s the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see.

Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
you would be paralyzed.

Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding,
the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birdwings.

From The Essential Rumi

Although the wind

Izumi Shikibu
(Translated by Jane Hirshfield )

Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.

The Way Back

Kristy Hellum

Why is it I can only trust people
Who have had their heart broken
100 times who have been
tortured in foreign jails who have
repeated their time in rehab over
and over their
families going broke
whose life companions have
died in their arms or
whose newborn arrived still or with
unexpected chromosomes or
those living in countries ruled by hateful
tyrants and with forced circumstance
could not leave?
Perhaps it is because they have not stopped singing
Perhaps because they have come back
They have come back singing
It is they who left that blood
red twine along the
labyrinth
for me
to find
my way

No, No There is No Going Back

Wendell Berry

No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that have belonged to you.
You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over the grave.
Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.

Oceans

Juan Ramon Jimenez

I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing.

And nothing
happens!
Nothing . . . Silence . . . Waves . . .

– Nothing happens?
Or has everything happened,
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?

For Courage

John O’Donohue

When the light around you lessens
And your thoughts darken until
Your body feels fear turn
Cold as a stone inside,

When you find yourself bereft
Of any belief in yourself
And all you unknowingly
Leaned on has fallen,

When one voice commands
Your whole heart,
And it is raven dark,

Steady yourself and see
That it is your own thinking
That darkens your world,

Search and you will find
A diamond-thought of light,

Know that you are not alone
And that this darkness has purpose;
Gradually it will school your eyes
To find the one gift your life requires
Hidden within this night-corner.

Invoke the learning
Of every suffering
You have suffered.

Close your eyes.
Gather all the kindling
About your heart
To create one spark.
That is all you need to nourish the flame
That will cleanse the dark
Of its weight of festered fear.

A new confidence will come alive
To urge you toward higher ground
Where your imagination
Will learn to engage difficulty
As its most rewarding threshold!

I Go Down To The Shore

Mary Oliver

I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall —
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.

The Return

Suzanne Anderson

Have I arrived on the shore of a new life?
Maybe the boatman rode me in on a quiet wave
in the dark of night
and humbly left me on the empty strand.
No trumpets, no cosmic moon alignments,
no obvious thresholds crossed.
What if this simple arriving is enough?
A toehold,
a few grains of sand beneath my feet,
enough for my first steps forward.

I have waited for some sign that this difficult passage is over.
The dark nights,
the terrors unspoken,
the nose to the grindstone,
the Sisyphean pushing of the stone uphill,
the endless uncertainty.
That it is done.
The seeds counted,
the sheaves of grain piled neatly,
the sacrifices made on the altar of loss.

What if this is all that must be given now?
The cup turned back over
wider and deeper for its journey
open to be filled again.
What if there is no grand resurrection?
Instead, the simple act of
walking along this new shore
uncertain, innocent, hopeful.
Leaving footprints in the wet sand,
saying I have come from somewhere,
I am going somewhere,
And I am here now.

From You Make Your Path by Walking