Season of Grief
My grandmother sat at the head of her oak table
one Labor Day afternoon & in a lull turned to me & said
all the people I knew are dead. When she fixed those two words, I knew,
I felt my heart in the world beat its blood through thin chambers. The constant
rush still interrupts the body I didn’t make, but keep breathing somehow
& functioning until I can’t, & the night before she died, I felt the easing of her spirit,
& the same when my aunt died the year before. I still say to my still-grieving
cousin I’m here—an echo of her mother’s absence, & we are left
together on this side of unknowing, stack like throwing bricks
all the finite seasons we have
& will spend without them. Up against my own lifetime
I wish for fog, early morning. Instead, unpredictable years keep emptying.
Copyright © 2023 by Khadijah Queen. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 2, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.
“The pandemic and its ongoing impact forced me to think about death on a scale I hadn’t yet contemplated—the personal, unrelenting loss of loved ones, friends, health, my social life, and more. When I write, I often blend memory, the present, and the future. The present tends to show up as a feeling, tone, or grounding mechanism. At the end of this poem, which offers no comfort, I let myself echo my grandmother’s matter-of-fact hopelessness, which comes at the beginning of the poem. She died in 2023, at the age of 103. Her favorite poet was Sara Teasdale, whose work holds a similarly tough melancholy.”
—Khadijah Queen
Khadijah Queen
