The wound is the place where the light enters you.

~ Rumi

No one wants to endure pain, especially of the worst kind, but pain is part of what it means to live, just like shadows are the twins of light. When nothing seems to help alleviate our pain, words may be our only comfort, which is why some of the oldest poems in the world are elegies. It is out of such a need for consolation that we turn to poets, to shed light in the dark places of our wounds, to know that someone else has been there.

In this post, I share three poems of grief by three poets of vast different background. The first poet is an emperor of China, the second is a contemporary author and poet, and the third, a scientist. All three have “been there”, giving weight to every word that pours forth from their poetry.

“Expressions of My Grief” by Emperior Qianlong (Qing Dynasty, China)

It is 8 pm. Emperor of China, Qianlong, a man in his eighties, is resting in his bed chamber. Images of his loving wife, Xiaoxian Chun, who passed away some fifty years ago, come to his mind. More than a dutiful spouse, the empress was his childhood sweetheart, a soulmate with whom he shared his thoughts and feelings. She was a caring daughter-in-law and a diligent manager of imperial family affairs, who garnered respect from all. In 1748, the empress, heartbroken by the recent loss of their son at the age of just two, fell ill while touring eastern China with her husband. Soon after, she died. Qianlong never again formed a similarly close attachment with any of his other consorts.

Devastated by her sudden death, Qianlong wrote more than a hundred elegies to express his grief and to commemorate her. Below is an excerpt from two of Qianlong’s soulful poems, which he also expressed in the form of calligraphy.

EXPRESSION OF MY GRIEF

I can well believe that life is a dream,
And that all things are but empty.
Alas! Sorrow laced with sorrow;
To be separated in life!
Having lost my wife,
Who will follow me now?
When entering her bedroom,
I inhale sadness,
I climb behind her phoenix bed-curtains,
Yet they hang to no avail.
The romance of the spring breeze and autumn moon
All ends here.
Summer days and winter nights spent with her
Will never come again.

~ Translated by Alister Inglis

“I Sing” by John Rybicki

The following poem is heartrending because the subject is the poet’s wife, Julie Moulds (a poet herself), who at the age of 29, was diagnosed with cancer, just five years after they got married. She was cared for by her husband, and a team of caregivers for sixteen years before she passed on. In words both raw yet graceful, authentic, and wise, Rybicki bares his soul in the way he knows best – through poetry. The poem I present is actually merged from extracts of two poems by Rybicki because they seem to fit so well.

I SING

I sing to keep
the embers in the night sky alive –
those sparks God tows
out of my love’s chest each night.
I sing from the
crown of her stubbed head
to the arch of her foot
where I’d kiss and kiss her
till she said,
Dude, rub in the love like you do.

If love could grant me one wish,
it would be this:
I would bloom
and take Julie inside me,
keep her safe,
leave one lantern rocking
in the night sky over her head
where God’s heart should be.

John Rybicki (b. 1961) is the author of three poetry books. The above poem is in his third collection, When All the World Is Old (2012). His other poetry collections are Traveling at High Speeds (1996) and We Bed Down Into Water (2008).

“Antidotes to Fear of Death” by Rebecce Elson

Rebecca Elson (1960-1999) was a promising 29-year astronomer when she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a blood cancer that typically invades people in their sixties and seventies. Throughout the bodily brutality of the treatment and the haunting uncertainty of life in remission, she met death on its own terms, as a reality set by the impartial laws of nature, and in the process, what her poem made of that terrifying meeting was something uncommonly beautiful.

ANTIDOTES TO FEAR OF DEATH

Sometimes as an antidote
To fear of death,
I eat the stars.

Those nights, lying on my back,
I suck them from the quenching dark
Till they are all, all inside me,
Pepper hot and sharp.

Sometimes, instead, I stir myself
Into a universe still young,
Still warm as blood:

No outer space, just space,
The light of all the not yet stars
Drifting like a bright mist,
And all of us, and everything
Already there
But unconstrained by form.

And sometimes it’s enough
To lie down here on earth
Beside our long ancestral bones:

To walk across the cobble fields
Of our discarded skulls,
Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis,
Thinking: whatever left these husks
Flew off on bright wings.