Once, New, Sorrow

~a poem~

She lands in the front lawn
like a white, foaming sea wave—

earnest, uninvited. She overtakes
the porch, as if humidity herself. 
The porch is my chest

where she sits heavy 

on a creaking
rocking chair. Each movement strains
the wooden joints; the rhythm 

she begins is anything
but comforting.

Hydrangeas line the drive, or did 
before she crushed 

half of the blueish clusters, too much
for brittle stems, already 

drooping in their fullness 
at summer’s end. Once

a lovely, balanced bed— seasons 
of loss and patience 
on public exhibition—

trampled by the clumsy
entrance of my Giantess.
I’m not home 

and she knows it but somehow
found me at the cottage; it’s

the porch

that is to blame, I’ll wager,                      
wide and welcoming—
screened in, too, but torn
at nearly every seam

so bugs are finding me
delectable. You’ll break it

I think to myself, all too aware
of her size, her chair. Her dress,
made of moth wings, impossibly

gathered, spills out, carpeting 
the planks that make the floor. 

She spends too long unfolding,
then refolding, rearranging— I see

there’s fear in her
fidgeting, I fear 
the wonder

has all drained, right from her center—

     not like honey from a hive, 
     not like rain that pools, to overflow
     a loosened gutter—

     but like raisins
     in the fixed, essential grip 
     of a toddler’s fist— where

     chub, dirt, sweat, saliva mix
     with that one precious
     snack, until a new thing grabs

     their attention. Then, uncurling
     sticky digits, the old grapes fall

     uneaten, forgotten altogether. 

If they’d been seeds that fell,
(maybe sunflower)

a yellow kind of hope
could have arisen here

—which is simply untrue.
The porch is grey

entirely. Her hair is wiry, undone,
and Sorrow’s overweight. I wait

for her to speak, fixing my vision 
on barely-there-droplets-in-the-evening-air

—the water cycle, visible
but lacking 

beauty, as I once imagined it. 
How can I address her now, 
regal yet unbecoming? I begin

with accusation.

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*This is the 5th and final poem of my Sorrow series that I’m sharing here, for now.

*Today also marks the 20th poem I’ve shared on Substack. Thank you for reading and interacting with all these words. Here’s to the last week of Epiphanytide!