What is the relationship between grief and honesty,
grief and truth?
I see grief as a braided rope
with strands of anger, sadness, fear, disgust,
all those most knotted of reactions
to what we have lost, in a word, to our pain.
Is grief truth because it names our most humbling truth:
we of the humus, we have lost
We lose, daily, in each moment, big and small
Is this it? Is this all there is to it?
We have lost, and we are lost
until we dare to speak truth, that is,
until we dare to grieve
Does it make the prospect of grief less a monster when I say,
“today I’m here to speak the truth of my being human“?
Having committed to truth as a naive twelve year old,
I did not know I had apprenticed to grief,
have I been absconding my mistress’ lessons all this time?
Grief, growing honesty in me,
you knock, I open the door
— after “self portrait as sedge meadow” by Rosemerry Whatola Trommer
