The Sound of Grief
Low and guttural,
Wrenched from that
Place
Man cannot reach
Nor bring solace.
The sound of grief—
Deafening
Yet eerily quiet.
Hollow.
Silence where noise
Should have been.
Absence
More keenly felt
Than presence.
Regret rattles mercilessly
Through the hallways
Of the mind.
The sound of grief
Pulls me
Into the bottomless well
Of my own pain.
And then presses me
To crawl back out,
To become a life raft
To another.
This is a poem featured in my upcoming dual timeline novel, The Unbroken Horizon. One of my main characters, Maggie, has just moved to Washington, D.C., at the height of the 1918-19 Spanish influenza epidemic, and is processing the loss and grief she’s encountered because of it.