Clear Mo(u)rning

All of us experience loss. From childhood on, things that we hoped for, fail to materialize, things that we had become accustomed to or loved, disappear. Sometimes these losses are trivial, sometimes devastating. But no matter how universal this experience, we must all learn to deal with it alone. Loss is personal.

As we grow older, our personal losses accumulate, and collectively they form a great monument, a conglomerate memorial growing inside of us, which no one sees, but which everyone senses, whenever they are with us. These losses begin to account for a great part of who we are: an identity fashioned of voids.

We might live for decades with little or no conscious realization of this, and then something happens, which suddenly and implacably brings it home. For me, it was the loss of my mother. That loss gathered up, as a mother does, the entire brood of all my little losses, and made of it that internal family I call myself. As she had in life, her death birthed me.

For years now, as a kind of spiritual practice, I have written a daily poem. So it was natural to me, just as a part of the habit of who I am, to continue that practice. Thus I made a poetic record of the short period of my mother's illness, of the day of her passing, and of the weeks following her passing. That record comprises the 31 poems of this book.

Dettagli