but everyone knows sorrow is incurable

Happy Easter to those celebrating, and Chag Sameach a couple of days late for the beginning of Passover. This is always a weird time of year for me, because I never really manage to do Passover, and I don't do Easter because I am Jewish, and also I tend to forget that both holidays are happening. I like holidays, but I have never been very observant about them.

I'm more observant about personal anniversaries, which is one thing I especially appreciate about doing National Poetry Month every year: it allows me to chronicle events in some unexpected and important ways. Since my brother died in March of 2011, I've taken April 5—the day we held his memorial—as a day to post a poem about grief, or loss, or mourning. My brother would undoubtedly hate most of these poems (he wasn't much for poetry), but to be honest, it's not really about him. Grief is more universal than that, and reading—and sharing—poems about loss remind me that even though my experience is my own, and every person's experience is different and singular, I am not alone.

This is also your content warning for the following poem: it's about grief, and it's a little devastating.

"What everyone should know about grief"
is why I buy the magazine.
Between aerobic virtue on one page
and the thrills of Machu Picchu on another
grief finds its marketable stage.

The living tell their chronicles
of hurt and lost and dead.
In syncopated copy they rehearse
"the cost of rage," "the comfort of belief,"
in words and captioned movements of the head.

The story proffers help:
advises talking as the healing cure,
commends long walks, and therapies,
assures the grieving that they will endure,
and then it gently cautions: let go, move on.

But everyone knows sorrow is incurable:
a bruised and jagged scar
in the rift valley of the body;
shrapnel seeded in the skin;
undoused burning pyres of war.

And grief is one thing nearly personal,
a hairline fracture in an individual skull;
homemade elegy which sounds its keening
in the scarred heart's well;
where it is too deep to reach

the ladder of light
sent down from lands above,
where hands write words
to work the winch
to plumb the shaft below.

—Ingrid de Kok (b. 1951), "What Everyone Should Know About Grief," from Transfer, 1997, though in this case from Seasonal Fires: New and Selected Poems (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006). I first read a version of this poem that was missing the last two stanzas, and weirdly I think I like it better when the poem feels like it ends in the middle, but I like the complete version, too.