Grief, Loss, Who Do I Trust

My grief is a tide that rises and falls without warning, sweeping away the familiar shores of my being. I write to you not as a poet but as a fellow bearer of sorrow, for the shining sun has dimmed in my own heart as well. Loss leaves us bewildered, asking who we can trust when even the ground beneath us shifts and crumbles. The world, so beautifully crafted and cruel, enforces its punitive measures, and Webster's Law Dictionary might define punitive simply as, but when enforced this new practice seems bent on prey. And there too the blind is the loss. Lilly kissed a rose—a gentle act of love—and was cast into chains. This new economy, sharp-edged and ravenous, feeds on the frail and the kind with open hands. Compassion and empathy, once the pillars of our shared humanity, now seem relics of a time gone by. Where did they go? Where does a soul, simple of heart and like mind, find his place when the world turns its face and acts blind? Now, my room is my cell, and solitary confinement is no teacher of gentleness. Justice, unkind and unseeing, renders its verdicts without mercy. Roses are lilies, rivers are streams, and yet none of these now flow freely. Even the smallest fish, safe in the shallows, are swept away by high tides forced into the deep, there then they are eaton their beauty a memory now gone. In one end and out the other, like cremation, without the flames. Such loss has rippled through my heart and mind, leaving me bereft. How can I miss what is gone and yet feel its absence so keenly? Blind from the pain of it all, I cry out to the Lord, seeking light, seeking a way to walk forward through the valley of my shadow called death. I see children swinging under the shade of trees, their laughter a balm I cannot feel. Their joy is untouched by the tides that pull at me. Still, the sea calls. Its waves, indifferent and vast, beckon me to wade into the surf, to lose myself in its embrace. It feels final, yet strangely tender—a surrender, not even in such is defeat. Perhaps, dear reader, you too hear the sea's call. Perhaps you long for its quiet peace as I do. But if I may offer one small kindness, it is this: in the spaces between sorrow, remember the lilies, the rivers, the fishing pole once held in my hand. Hold them close, and let their memory keep you enamoured to the sand of your own sandy shore. With a heart weighed down yet tender and kind, I am James