Keep Creating! - Episode 10

First, check out my latest post about alchemizing grief .

A Prompt (If You Choose to Accept It)

Personify Your Grief

One of my favorite writing exercises are around personification. It’s the act of giving human qualities to something non-human. Basically, it is a way of breathing life into abstract feelings, complex feelings, feelings that may take a lifetime to unlock. Personification is a magical poetic device.

So here’s a creative prompt for you:

If your grief (the emotion) were personified, who would he/she/they be?
What’s their story? How do they speak?
What do they wear? What’s their favorite food?
What do they want from you? How do they move through the world?
What do you want from them?

Still feeling stuck? Make a list of action-words that make us human and attribute them to grief:

Examples: Hide, Haunt, Cry, Fly, Ask, Tremble, Spin, Crouch, Grow, Laugh…

Photo by The Good Funeral Guide on Unsplash

It’s Complicated

Grief taps the church stain glass

“Look up” she exclaims, smiling-sacred

Except her teeth are rotting, gums show

Her world spins slow; confusion haunts her face

Truth is: we’ll look away

Grief sobs, whispers goodbye

As unarmed vehicles swerve

Through the arteries of neighborhoods

She’s singing to a migrant mother

As she’s cuffed, roughed up, disappeared

Grief wails guttural

You can fill a cold cell with her yearning

We ritualistically look away or

cover our ears

Except, not today

Today, we watch grief turn a trick

Her bruised and blemished legs shimmering sunlight

She sashays like a death wish, some call her “fast”

Nobody asks who violated

So she makes snow angels

From the ashes of charred forests

Paints her lips with loneliness
Calls it war paint

Grief misbehaves

Never crosses her legs

Spits, curses, twirls

She’s unruly

She’s a murder of crows perched on a power line

She’ll follow you home

You’ll lose sleep

Grief floats through our collective dream

A bloom of jellyfish crowding ocean surface

She’s the bright pink and the stinging

She’s

Stinging

Stinging

Stinging.

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