Like newly-felled maples,
we mark our years in rings
of loss, summers
of blighted shade, evenings
of not enough rain,
though we grow inward
from mottled bark
to woody core.

I have read about grief
as though it were a parade
we could watch from the sidewalk:
Anger marching just ahead
of the veterans
in their smartly pressed uniforms
but several blocks behind
the brass band
of Denial-- while Acceptance,
the grand marshal of it all,
brings up the rear in a Cadillac
like the exclamation point
at the end
of a run-on sentence;

though grief to you seems more
an aimless road
through some foreign country,
wending among towns whose citizens
have left for jobs in distant cities,
past fields of weed and rubble,
toward a stand of new growth forest
just coming into view.
There we will inexplicably stop
in the gauzy sunlight,
the ground softened by years of leafall
as though this had always been
our destination,
if only to stand for a time
in solidarity with the trees.

Art Nahill

From What Death Would Be Without Us, Art Nahill, New Spirit Press Chapbook Series,
Kew Gardens, NY, 1994.