u/AwaySnow2738

I’ve carried my grief through endless weeks
as if the gods marked me for ruin.
Perhaps I touched what was never mine,
a wound in the world that punishes
those who feel too much.

Each day, it returns like a tide rehearsed,
striking the same place
over and over again,
and I just stand there
waiting for the next hit,
like an altar built for suffering
too still to run,
too sacred to fall apart.

The tear stains line my face like constellations,
mapping every place I’ve broken.
If the heavens are watching,
I hope they see how small I’ve become
how I keep kneeling
to a sorrow that refuses to end me.

Sadness sits on my tongue,
a ritual I no longer question.
It burns, but I drink anyway,
as if this pain were holy
as if somewhere between
the salt and the silence,
I might finally be forgiven.

Scarlet M

https://www.reddit.com/r/OCPoetry/s/l0wSlZd9Qc

https://www.reddit.com/r/OCPoetry/s/IhucZszoHI

Last November, my grandfather left.
I loved him.
That part was simple.

The rest arrived in fragments that didn’t assemble into grief.
There were mornings I rose anyway,
pulled myself through stations and fluorescent hours,
as if life had no interest in pause.
Work demanded hands, not remembrance.
The world kept its schedule, immaculate and indifferent.

I learned the choreography of disappearance:
smiling at the right intervals,
breathing only when no one was watching,
folding tears into the seams between tasks
so they wouldn’t spill into anything official.

Somewhere in that repetition,
mourning lost its shape.
Not gone
dissolved, like ink in too much water,
still staining everything,
no longer readable.
In my mind I knew: he is gone.
The fact remained clean, administrative.

Grief, however, had nowhere to complete its work
no document it could sign,
no body it could stay beside.
And so it learned to become quiet.
Only when the day loosens its grip
when the room returns to itself and I am no longer required
does it reassemble in me.

Not as sorrow,
but as weather remembered in the bones.

I try to reach him there.
His voice arrives first
not words, but warmth given sound,
a hand you cannot hold anymore
still remembering how to comfort.

I search for him in the archive of my failing memory:
the edges already softened,
time erasing what I once swore I would never lose.

I wish I had kept more of him
pressed him into recordings, photographs, proof.
But absence edits aggressively.

What remains is not whole.
Only a residue of tenderness
caught in the air he used to occupy.
And I hold onto that
as if warmth alone could still mean presence.

Scarlet M

https://www.reddit.com/r/OCPoetry/s/l0wSlZd9Qc

https://www.reddit.com/r/OCPoetry/s/IhucZszoHI