keep singing

My brother Pete died fifteen years ago in March, which is kind of crazy to think about. How can it have been fifteen years? How has it only been fifteen years? (Maybe less the second one, but later this month I turn 41, which is the age he was when he died, and that sure makes me feel some type of way.) Grief is a very strange thing, and sometimes poetry helps me understand it better, or at least feel less alone in something that is often isolating, even while being completely universal. Since 2012—or 2011, I guess, if you count the original day—I've been posting grief poems on April 5, the anniversary of the day we held his memorial.

This poem is from Gregory Orr's How Beautiful the Beloved, which is a whole book of perfect little gems like this one.

Grief will come to you.
Grip and cling all you want,
It makes no difference.

Catastrophe? It's just waiting to happen.
Loss? You can be certain of it.

Flow and swirl of the world.
Carried along as if by a dark current.

All you can do is keep swimming;
All you can do is keep singing.

—Gregory Orr, "Grief will come to you," from How Beautiful the Beloved (Copper Canyon Press, 2008).