siobhanmcelduff

I don’t write poetry very often, but here is something I’m trying to help with loss:

I think about Cicero,

An old man weeping for his lost Tullia,

‘I bury myself in a dark, bitter wood’, he writes,

As Atticus tells him to be more Roman.

‘I talk only with my books but I cannot stop weeping’, he writes,

Trying to explain why he cannot become Cicero again.

‘Day and night I read everything written on loss’, he writes,

Hoping that someone will understand why he is broken,

Why he cannot leave his daughter’s ghost in those woods,

But brings her everywhere with him in the salt evidence of his grief.

And I think about how I cannot leave you behind, my dearest,

That you will follow me forever, a soft ghost that shambles alongside.

There is no wood dark or bitter enough to make us forget loss.