Remembering ... Always, Forever, and No Matter What

Over the time frame of about twenty years I have lost two of my darling sisters to cancer and my adored Mother to Parkinson's Disease.  This week a much loved Uncle joined them and my heart returned to the old ache it has borne before. I wrote a poem at the time my sweet sister, Robyn, left us and have revised it many times since, trying to get it just right, to allow it to speak for me of the nature of things I don't truly comprehend. It is an experimental form poem, wherein the title becomes the first line.  It is also a negative space poem, meaning it addresses something that is empty or vacant or...maybe free is a better description, such as the space between the typed letters you see here. It speaks of the holes in a snowflake that create its beauty and compares it to the hole of the grave that doesn't really hold anything more than just bones, thereby defining the beauty of Heaven.

lovely


nothing, arranged
inside a crystal riddle
of happenstance ice. minuscule


perfection, shaped by shifting
chance, like unformed thoughts
that hold a poem. lovely


nothing. only cold bones
are clothed for burial, body
dressed to songs of tears. lovely


nothing, offering up emptiness,
a chrysalis redeemed,
A pristine hope of fullness. Oh, lovely


nothing, hidden, hollow,
empty of hurt, defining Heaven
and snow with a hole.

S.N.

I love you Uncle Glenn. You'll be missed.