A Bittersweet Milestone

On sending precious words into the world, and owning the sacred story.

Despite having planned several posts I’ve been dormant for a while, accidentally. It always surprises me how often life defies language.

In that quiet interval, more loss has happened, and I’ve been trying to talk myself out of feeling it fully, though this one pulls on many threads.

Meanwhile, I’ve been waiting since December to share something that feels momentous and challenging.

On Wednesday, The Garfield Lake Review published my poem Soil and Solitude.

I wrote the piece in June 2022, amidst the haze of the first anniversary of Steve’s death, only half aware of what I was doing, whilst honouring the sense that this poem was ‘good’. I have a habit of saving poems for best when I don’t know where to put them.

I sat on it for several years, occasionally trying my hand with different journals.
The Garfield Lake Review’s call for pieces on grief and loss finally gave this poem a home.

Even so, it’s hard to send something out into the world when all that it means still gets lodged in my throat. Learning how to be with this story is taking longer than I’d like.

You can read the poem in the journal’s digital edition here.

Photo by Domenico Gentile on Unsplash