By Michael Arvanitis
I don’t like this. I am Lonely
And I don’t know what else to do.
Being isolated and by myself
Brings back memories of my last months with You.
(818) 788-HOPE (4673)
Grief Support Groups Serving West Los Angeles, Encino and Agoura Hills
Grief Support Groups Serving West Los Angeles, Encino and Agoura Hills
Poetry (Page 3)
By Lynn Ungar, Unitarian Minister What if you thought of itas the Jews consider the Sabbath—the most sacred of times?Cease from travel.Cease from buying and selling.Give up, just for now, on trying to make the worlddifferent than it is. Sing. Pray. Touch only thoseto whom you commit your life.Center down. And when your body has become still,reach out with your heart.Know that we are…
The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other’s welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your…
Michael Linsk is a poet and HOPE Connection group alum.
My wife, lover, friend, soul mate
is no longer a warm, living, breathing part of my life.
Death intervened.
A guest came to visit
uninvited
without so much as a knock at the door.
Grief arrived…
bathed in the empty stillness left by an aching absence,
my new companion rests comfortably among reminders of earlier times.
Allowing me freedom to go about creating a new life
but still present when time slows
and the roaring silence fails to fill the gaping void.
I eat dinner standing in the kitchen
Because that’s now what I do
When I sit at the dining room table
I still expect to sit down next to you.
Don Phillipson is a writer who lives in Thousand Oaks. He was a HOPE Group member until October, 2018.
I sit in a darkened theater, beautiful blue velvet curtains, having just
descended, guard the stage.
The curtain has just come down after the third act, and I sit stunned, dazed.
Five feet tall, forty years old, a steel witness to a life no more. I open the four drawers and pull out the files. Some slim and clean, others heavy, showing their age. They store happy memories of travel around the world, celebrations of birthdays, and anniversaries, the joy of remodeling the house, receipts for various acquisitions, utility bills and bank…
When the dead return they will come to you in dream and in waking, will be the bird knocking, knocking against glass, seeking a way in, will masquerade as the wind, its voice made audible by the tongues of leaves, greedily lapping, as the waves’ self-made fugue is a turning and returning, the dead will not then nor ever again desert you,…
I exhale. The breath born but a moment ago recedes into the past as I await the next breath to begin. Because every breath is a gateway between past and future, breathing is an ever-present metaphor for the temporal world in which we live. Nature’s patterns proceed in rhythms. Requiring belief in life’s continuity in stark counter-point to the reality of our…