Someone very close to me died this week, after a short illness.

We all mourn and grieve in different ways.

I am more likely to turn to music and to words than to people at times such as this.

And so, the poet Tess Gallagher captures some of what I feel just now:

Yes

Now we are like the flat cone of sand

in the garden of the Silver Pavilion in Kyoto

designed to appear only in moonlight.

Do you want me to mourn?

Do you want me to wear black?

Or like moonlight on whitest sand

to use your dark, to gleam, to shimmer?

I gleam. I mourn.

Tess Gallagher

CQ