hushed

My brother died in 2011. On April 5, about 10 days after he died, we held a memorial service—some of you were there, in fact—and because it was the fifth year I'd posted poems for National Poetry Month, I posted a poem about loss. (I posted several poems about loss, that year.) Then I started posting poems that had something to do with death or grief or loss on April 5 each year, as a kind of continued memorial. The poetry helped, that first year (and later), although I had other anchors, too: friends and family and My Chemical Romance, which I mention now because I am ostensibly supposed to see them again this fall for the first time since the week my brother died. What a world we live in.

Being past the decade mark since my brother died is a weird feeling, not because grief goes away—it doesn't—but because the way you feel it changes. Most often, now, I see something or read something or watch something and think, "God, Pete would love this," or "I wish I could talk to Pete about this," and it hits me with sadness but also a bittersweet sort of happiness when things remind me of him. I miss him, but it's less devastating now (mostly), and even when it hurts, I like to be reminded that I carry him with me.

All of which is to say that Pete did not give one single shit about poetry, so the poems I post are for me, not him. But I love him, and I miss him, and I think the fact that poetry offers so many different ways to look at grief and loss and life and death and love is pretty awesome. Here is a poem about a tree.

...and a decrepit handful of trees.
—Aleksandr Pushkin

And I matured in peace born of command,
in the nursery of the infant century,
and the voice of man was never dear to me,
but the breeze’s voice—that I could understand.
The burdock and the nettle I preferred,
but best of all the silver willow tree.
Its weeping limbs fanned my unrest with dreams;
it lived here all my life, obligingly.
I have outlived it now, and with surprise.
There stands the stump; with foreign voices other
willows converse, beneath our, beneath those skies,
and I am hushed, as if I’d lost a brother.

—Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966), "Willow," translated by Jennifer Reeser and published in Poetry magazine in December, 2005. Translations of Akhmatova vary pretty widely and I often really dislike them, but I love this one.