“Grief” by Barbara Crooker

Grief

is a river you wade in until you get to the other side.
But I am here, stuck in the middle, water parting
around my ankles, moving downstream
over the flat rocks. I’m not able to lift a foot,
move on. Instead, I’m going to stay here
in the shallows with my sorrow, nurture it
like a cranky baby, rock it in my arms.
I don’t want it to grow up, go to school, get married.
It’s mine. Yes, the October sunlight wraps me
in its yellow shawl, and the air is sweet
as a golden Tokay. On the other side,
there are apples, grapes, walnuts,
and the rocks are warm from the sun.
But I’m going to stand here,
growing colder, until every inch
of my skin is numb. I can’t cross over.
Then you really will be gone.

In “Grief,” American poet Barbara Crooker elicits the desire to hold onto pain and sorrow, the thread that keeps us tied to those we love. The image of a woman immersed in a river, refusing to embrace the warmth and abundance on the other side is both tragic and relatable. After all, who hasn’t experienced the manner in which a loss can shade the whole world grey? Who hasn’t held sorrow in their arms, to “nurture it / like a cranky baby?”

Personal Tragedy as Poetic Inspiration

Credit: barbaracrooker.com

Crooker is no stranger to loss: a divorce and the stillbirth of her first daughter motivated her to start writing poetry in the 1970s. Inspired by the American poet Diane Wakoski, Crooker penned poems on the themes of love, loss, birth and family. Her first published poem, “The Lost Children,” explored the exquisitely painful and unique bereavement experienced by mothers of miscarried and stillborn children; a grief that is both persistent and disenfranchised. As she wrote, “We glimpse them on escalators, / over the shoulders of dark-haired women; / they return to us in dreams.”

In exploring how we are both possessive of and haunted by grief, Crooker suggests that grief may a require nurturing, acknowledgment, or relinquishment — in other words, a vast array of approaches easily dismissed by our focus on the quick fix.