WEATHERING GRIEF

As the title suggests, this is a poem about grief… specifically the grief of losing a mother.

Poetry can be a bit of a puzzle to some, so, for this piece, I thought I would give an insight into the process of how I chose imagery to illustrate the position of the bereaved.

WEATHERING GRIEF, as the title suggests, is about grief, specifically the grief of losing a mother.

First, how I came to write this poem…

No matter our age, we will all eventually become 'orphans'. I was adopted at ten days old, then at eighteen months my adoptive father died. My mother was my everything, and the fact that I had no siblings made this bond incredibly close. Losing her was very difficult. I felt the only string I had, had been cut, and I was adrift.

I express this through the lone figure of a lamb, ‘shorn’ in the sense that the blanket of love, comfort and reassurance has been stripped away.

Being cold is synonymous with being bereft of a basic human need, a mother's presence. It is difficult to speak without losing control of emotion during loss which manifests itself physically as a weight, the ‘bellyful of stones’, a discomfort which we may hold for ever. The moor is representative of the vast space one finds oneself in during the grieving process, a time when the voice is somewhat lost in the sense that words are unutterable, unable to convey the depth of sorrow. The ‘wool-muffle’ represents the physical presence of a mother. How many times did we snuggle in as a child, and feeling the warmth of love made everything all right?

Stanza Two comes back to the visuals of the moor, what the lamb, or orphan, sees in contrast to its own isolation. In this case, it is aware of many other sheep, or ‘pom-poms of wild cotton’ dotted all over the landscape which is then clarified as ‘fat mothers love-walling babies’, but the lamb is outside of all this now.

In Stanza Three, I bring back the poem to include the human viewpoint. Again, there is reference to the cold in ‘Trembling like winter grass’, and I have subtly referenced the sheep’s wool in ‘dropped stitches in the knit’. Grief sets us apart, presents us with a space which was once inhabited by a loved one; it’s a hole that will never be mended.

I end with the statement ‘but see only snowfall’. If we consider what the lamb sees from a distance – many sheep – we perceive how these tiny white blobs may mimic snow, but it also leads us back to the missing warmth in previous images, as well as tying in with the title.