This time there will be no trail of tears
Starkly staining my cheeks
For all who care to look.
Once looking, they will not see
Red rimmed eyes, puffy and swollen with grief.
No trail of tears for you to trace
No thoughts of dreams destroyed
When first you broke my heart.
This time there will be no outward signs
No trace of loss will cloud my eyes
This wizened shell remains,
The fleeting whispers of desire
Alive and incandescent in a virtual world
Until it teetered and collapsed
Unsustainable in every way
Stretching across a continent
The fragile thread could only break
And leave a heart bereft but unbroken
Nodding in acknowledgment
Of certain inevitability.
Or sobs that shake an aged chest.
You'll only find a quiet smile,
A quiet heart beats bittersweet
Within this battered chest.
Grief is not solely black though many believe it so.
Black hues engulf us in the beginning, when the shock of loss strangles hope,
Closing the senses to everything except the emptiness of nevermore,
Plunging us into the dark, cavernous cistern from which there appears no escape.
Grief comes clad in the colors of the seasons, assumes every hue:
Sometimes a blanketing frosty white cloud, chilling breath, obscuring sight,
Silently smothering the will,
Sometimes the roaring red of anger,
Rage unleashed, fists pounding against reality, demanding to know the why.
Sometimes the fierce orange flame of regret,
Its flickering tongue singeing our cheeks
Forcing us to face self-reproach burning without relief.
Sometimes splashes of silver, like the shards of a shattered mirror,
the multitude of loss repeated in slivers, irredeemable and irreplaceable
My grief is gray, the limbo land of in-between, lacking color or definition.
It is neither black nor white.
Its shades shift around my head, darkest on those days I held you near:
Birthday cakes unbaked, candles unlit,
presents that would have made you smile no longer purchased,
Anniversary dinners unplanned, uneaten, wine still corked, toasts unspoken.
That gray is the charcoal of pain, wanting only the match strike to ignite the conflagration.
On other days, my grief rides across my shoulders
like streaming wisps of gray, white clouds
Until a song unbidden reaches out over the airwaves,
And your voice fills my head,
And all at once I am enveloped by thunderclouds darkening, gloom billowing,
Tears stream in a brief shower of grief,
a flash flood of pain before the song ends and the memory fades.
The world resumes its center, and I wobble onward, off kilter, searching
But the gray mists persist
Disoriented, I wander, heartsick, through a drab, colorless world.
The Colors of Love in two stages
First love glows white hot
A supernova of exploding emotion
All the colors of a rainbow of desire
Imbuing each word and gesture with joy
The delicate pinks of possibilities
The scarlet reds of desire
The ocean blues of the night sky, sleepy evenings snuggled in each other’s arms
Waking to the lush verdant greens of the promise of tomorrow.
True love sparkles like strands of silver, silken and shimmering,
Silently slipping into silence of the night
Long after the laughter lifts, floating away in the dark
It is warmth woven into a lovers knot, pure and delicate, by wise and trusting hearts,
untarnished and unbreakable.
Kathleen Chamberlin is a retired educator living in Albany, New York. She began writing creatively during the quarantine period of Covid-19. Her writing has appeared in both print and online journals and anthologies. In addition to writing, she enjoys gardening, genealogy, and grandchildren.
