Jennifer Barber-V

After a Year

 

 
 

Is it an extravagance, this grief?

 

Is it clean, is it purely itself?

 

Would I feel it less if he’d been

 

ready after the treatments

 

or if he hadn’t written in the black-and-white

 

speckled notebook I bought him,

 

‘Nothing else to try…how, when?’

 

What if he had dreamed

 

death as light on a window sill,

 

shorebirds running at a wave?

 

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