Sue Oringel offers the following two poems as a reflection on the recent weekend retreat – Embracing Loss and Grief for Healing and Renewed Joy. Sue comments: “The first poem represents the shock of loss and the second, a move toward acceptance.”
The Fact of After
Stomach sucker-punched, you double over,
shaking. Face flushes, hot chills run through
your veins. Head pounds, heart pounds, you’re
feeling faint and you want to scream. Maybe
you do. No. No. But the line has been drawn
between before and after and you can’t
erase it. You can’t go back. That line
will always be there. Your head tries to
out-think it, but it can’t. It never will.
Disbelief covers you like a body bag, a shroud,
but in your thrashing, there will be rips. Pieces
of light, of the picture, will emerge,
will go from blur to clear. You rub your eyes,
but it’s still there. You rage, you plead,
but nothing works. The awful fact of after
becomes the clay you keep worrying, working
on and with, over and over, kneading, pounding,
until the shape becomes something,
something you can live with.
Autumn in Montclair
After the painting by George Inness, 1894
All is dreamy now, all is ablaze:
the fields, the skies, the clouds, two trees.
Pictured, the glory in these waning days.
A burning merges into the haze
of fields still green from summer’s ease.
All is dreamy now, all is ablaze.
The sky is darkening, the day’s rose’
shadow is spreading over fields and leaves.
Pictured, the glory in these waning days.
Black markings in the field direct the eyes
to a white smudge, a house between two trees.
Eye of the storm in which all is ablaze.
After the main elements, a museum note says,
red was applied thinly, then wiped off to a degree.
Pictured, the glory in these waning days.
Can smudge and gesture so arrest the gaze?
Heaven in all its glory hath not a one so great as these.
All is dreamy now, all is ablaze.
Pictured, the glory in these waning days.
–Susan E. Oringel