“your other heart of those dead afternoons
is tired of looking and not finding you.”
--- To My Brother Miguel in memoriam, by César Vallejo
You cannot hide in the closet,
or under shadows of empty shirt sleeves,
or between the raindrops of tears
torn from the damaged heart
does not believe it will ever be repaired.
Grief finds you no matter where you hide.
You cannot hide in the cloisters, praying
among monks whose tunics know more grief
from confessions than from any line from Psalms.
You cannot hide from a father calling you coward
for crying for something that will not return,
or alight on his finger as a Monarch.
Grief packs packages which takes forever to unpack.
You cannot hide.
You cannot bury yourself in the same grave.
You cannot shed tears enough to fill the ocean.
The salt of your wounds are endless, it seems.
No matter where you hide, the Light will find you,
the kind of Light that dissolves meaningful storms.
When it does, you will know the world still rotates.
It is the ones that do not spill seeds of sadness
who never harvest anything.
So come out of hiding.
Let me see what you have been holding back.
Come into my arms. There, there.
Let’s see if we can hurl ourselves into the grief
with such force we will finally be done with it.
Let us live the way we were meant to live.
Martin Willitts, Jr. has recent books including The Secret Language of the Universe (March Street Press, 2006); Lowering Nets of Light (Pudding House Publications, 2007); News from the Front (www.slowtrains.com, 2007); Alternatives to Surrender (Plain View Press, 2007); and Words & Paper (www.threelightsgallery.com, 2008).