don’t buy a sympathy card, buy this

Another thing that happened while I was too distracted by the release of ‘A Forager’s Life’ to give it the attention it deserved is that writer Iona Winter published a grief almanac called ‘a liminal gathering‘.

I submitted poems to it and Iona chose one for the almanac, which I share below. I feel privileged to be amongst the writers, artists, musicians and photographers who are part of this precious container for giving voice to grief.

Iona’s son, the musician and artist Reuben Winter killed himself in 2020. Since Reuben’s death, Iona has used her skills as a writer and communicator to be public with her grief in service to all who grieve and are silenced, or are too overcome by grief to speak themselves.

A review of the almanac by Hester Ullyart says, ‘This is a hopeful resource, much needed. A rope of stars thrown out into the murk of grief. I recommend this almanac for every shelf, for death touches us all, and no one need struggle alone.’

I so agree. This book contains both the intensity of new grief and the wearing plod of long-carried grief. It spans anger, raw shock and emotional pain through to gratitude, reverence, elegy…sometimes in the same piece of work.

If someone you love loses someone they love, don’t buy a sympathy card, buy them this. You will be giving them the gift of a chorus of voices who dwell in the same place as them, a liminal gathering: grief.

In his piece in the almanac Dear Reader, Rushi Vyas captures the some of the nuance of grief in his poem’s ending:

‘Dear Reader, go outside. Feel everything. The wind is cruel. And full of oxygen. The sun is deadly radiation. And our only source of warmth.’

-Rushi Vyas

& here is my poem from the almanac:

negotiating boundaries with the dead

grief: week one

kaimanawa horse in my living room

wild waters                        white flames

grief: week two

flower’s fingers holding medals 

i’m a hobo pedestaled for bravery

grief: week three

in the musty cave mushrooms sprout from armpits

it’s a total eclipse of the total eclipse

grief: week four

hurricane chasers, race to get best footage of worst damage

a raggedy lone wolf to stare down

grief week five: 

bat-infested feeling my way   with echo-location

drink puddle-water      trying for nutrition by chewing on a husk

grief: week six

(but wait there’s more

were you looking for a neat trajectory?) 

belly-crawling at toadstool height

make the bed with a chainsaw

grief: week seven

turns out the source of the tinnitus is my own throat’s moaning

some forest fires happen to crack the open the seeds of amoured shells. But not here.

Just another searing morning. The petrol pours itself.