the deepening ground

Grappling with loss… In the past three months, I’ve “lost” two people I deeply admired to cancer. Though I’m grateful that their suffering is over and I know they’ve “shuffled off this mortal coil” to skip the streets of gold, there’s still a natural grief. And though they have left this temporal realm, their lives are like the white space that continues to help define the shape and form of the poem that is me. With my deepest regards to Tennyson, this is my (much briefer) memoriam.

Memoriam – vincent h. anastasi (2/20/2020)
(for Ken & Julie)

If poetry celebrates
the white space
on the page,
then may these words
not detract
from the emptiness
that remains,

the recurring absence felt
at the end of each line –
the whisper between stanzas.

Rather, let the brevity
of this verse
magnify by contrast
the void devoid despair
(grief notwithstanding),
ever-present vacancy filled
wherein eternity echoes

the prevailing reminder
that you are gone
but never lost.