Grief Like Water

Grief like water
breaks
on the shore of the soul,
a storm of emotion crashing
from the deep sea of emptiness
pain heaving and coursing,
pitching the heart,
battering reality,
undermining normality.

Grief like water
surges
in spate ripping through
the exposed flank of the self
uprooting any attempts to hold it back,
unable to restrain emotions too strong,
constrain nearly unendurable pain
of remembered words of love unspoken,
of recalled words of frustration unretractable.

Grief like water
trickles
in dribs and drabs
when it feels as if too many tears
have been shed already,
a catch in the throat
an unexpected and unguarded thought
at the echo of absent presence at the sharp
edge of longing.

Grief like water
laps
at the threshold of awareness softly
frothing on the grains of memory and loss,
arriving and retreating,
ebbing and flowing
the tide of surviving,
the unrelenting motions
in the rhythm of being
and life carrying on.

Grief like water
meanders
flowing through the empty days and nights
after the losing, beyond the parting,
until in months or years it comes into the delta,
the estuary, the outlet
of life into further living
where softened it becomes a gentle aching
assuaged by time.