Grief's Pace

Grief is still pacing my floor
In angry staccato steps, or slow
Aimless movements place to place.
I cannot sweep it out the door.
This pain that does not want to let me go
Denies me peace within this space.

The regimented rhythm of life,
from which I longed for calm and air,
became in one short day
cut off from all the strife
set free from there
loosened, adrift, untethered and away.
I’m foundering.

Halls I walked for years
no longer are for me to walk.
I do not work there any more.
The traumas, crises, tears
of which I talk
have all gone on before.

Life is so wrenchingly real
behind the doors, within hospital walls.
The stuff we’re made of shows.
I can’t pretend to say I feel
okay for leaving it behind. It calls
to me. It calls from all of those
the best and worst we have to give.

Pain is so intimately known.
Pretense is gone. The blood and guts and soul
are open to be mended, to be seen
and heard. You wonder how I miss the moan?
The seeking to be whole
is what I miss. My thoughts careen

Never to be part of that again,
to be there in that world of raw emotion
in the ER where a world is split apart.
Since November that is how it’s been,
and still I am not beyond the notion
that being there is vital to my heart,
my worth attained there.

Grief is still pacing my floor
even though the garden waits outside.
Joy is diminished by the thought
that I am part of that life no more.
My calling, where identity resides,
was more who I am than it ought.

Grass, why are you greener
in the pasture where I cannot go?
Soul, expand and open to the gift
you’re given, of free time and new demeanor.
Find your claimedness from God within and so
accept the shift.
Reclaim yourself, in grief’s own time.