341 Grief poems

He manages like somebody carrying a box that is too heavy, first with his arms underneath. When their strength gives out, he moves the hands forward, hooking them on the corners, pulling the weight against his chest. He moves his thumbs slightly when the fingers begin to tire, and it makes different muscles take over. Afterward, he carries it on his shoulder, until the blood drains out of the arm that is stretched up to steady the box and the arm goes numb. But now the man can hold underneath again, so that he can go on without ever putting the box down.

Someone once asked me, what are the words I do not yet have — .... .... .... verbs that will story our bodies into something more than missing, more than squaw or lost, beyond statistics: 1 in 3 Native women will be raped in her lifetime. Daily ritual: my hands search and sift through layers of tiny earthquakes, shifted verdicts not guilty not enough evidence not prosecutable not our jurisdiction I dig. Native women are 2.5 times more likely to be sexually assaulted compared to all other races. I dig. We are vanishing lines in history books, treaties; laws do not protect us. I dig until mud and earth find home underneath my fingernails. I’ll plant something new in the absence burn vanish underreport Invisible, our ghosts starve, while the rest of the world keeps on eating. A recent government study found that there were14federal human trafficking investigations in Indian Country between2013and 2016. During that same period theFBIinvestigated 6,100 elsewhere. Let us poem a place where you cannot erase us into white space. .... .... .... Let us dig to remind ourselves our roots are ancestral and there is nothing deeper than these sacred, dirt-covered hands.

Withouten you No rose can grow; No leaf be green If never seen Your sweetest face; No bird have grace Or power to sing; Or anything Be kind, or fair, And you nowhere.

We low on daddies hereabouts The fathers all but gone Our lack a weight a shape a drybone lake By war by drink by gun by drift The father’s all but gone.

When I see the houses in this city, the electric gates and uniformed men employed to guard the riches of the rich, the gilded columns and gardens, the boats on water, I wonder, how to describe my home to you: the short, mud walls, the whispering roof, the veranda on which my whole family used to spread sheets and sleep. The year I came to find work in the city, my wife painted our house white so it would be brighter than the neighbours'. I beat her for her foolishness. The children are hungry, I said, the cow is old, the money collector is after my blood, and you steal like a magpie— half a month's wage—to decorate your nest like a shiny jewel? The monsoon finally arrived the year I left, dripped through the thatch, peeled paint off the walls. The wells grew full and overflowed. The farmers rejoiced in the fields. My son sat with his mouth open catching drops of water like a frog. My wife clung to the walls and wept. When I fall asleep on the pavements in this city, I try to imagine my wife's skin against mine, the kohl in her eyes, the white walls, the whole village sky bearing down upon us with all the weight of the stars. I think of returning to that life, but mostly I try to remember how the world was once. I want to open my mouth like my son, and swallow things whole— feel water filling all the voids, until I am shaped back into existence.

“peacekeeping troops” “tanks beneath the windows” The inside of someone else’s dwelling visible — a table and some chairs. You start to count one, two, three, four . . . until the explosion is near your neighborhood. You can guess the position of mortar by this counting and try to find a safe place. If the windows are gone, weak plastic is taped up but the strong wind comes and we stay awake. In this South Cholla Province where all vehicles had been confiscated, we resorted to walking, the method of travel of the Yi Dynasty. We reverted back 300 years. Kwangju, 1980 It’s the same to be in the house, at the shelter or anywhere. There is no safe place. When we have no electricity, we are sitting in the dark and we know what life looked like before Christ. Sarajevo, 1992

A woman wails,boo hoo, mourning her man Shut up, shame on you, don't cry to the hills! O little sister, I should have warned you Don't eat the meat, if it makes you cough blood!

Late, late, so late! and dark the night and chill! Late, late, so late! but we can enter still. Too late, too late! ye cannot enter now. No light had we: for that we do repent; And learning this, the bridegroom will relent. Too late, too late! ye cannot enter now. No light: so late! and dark and chill the night! O, let us in, that we may find the light! Too late, too late: ye cannot enter now. Have we not heard the bridegroom is so sweet? O, let us in, tho' late, to kiss his feet! No, no, too late! ye cannot enter now."

To have that letter arrive was like the mist that took a meadow and revealed hundreds of small webs once invisible The inevitable often stands by plainly but unnoticed till it hands you a letter that says death and you notice the weed field had been readying its many damp handkerchiefs all along

Now you hear what the house has to say. Pipes clanking, water running in the dark, the mortgaged walls shifting in discomfort, and voices mounting in an endless drone of small complaints like the sounds of a family that year by year you’ve learned how to ignore. But now you must listen to the things you own, all that you’ve worked for these past years, the murmur of property, of things in disrepair, the moving parts about to come undone, and twisting in the sheets remember all the faces you could not bring yourself to love. How many voices have escaped you until now, the venting furnace, the floorboards underfoot, the steady accusations of the clock numbering the minutes no one will mark. The terrible clarity this moment brings, the useless insight, the unbroken dark.