What Grief Becomes

I have known grief.

At first it was like winter
coming hard across the water,
breaking everything it touched.

Every holiday carried it.
Christmas lights.
A song in a store.
Even the quiet hour after dinner.

There were names
I could not say aloud.

The past felt close enough to touch
but already moving away.

Years passed.

Time did not repair the wound.
It did something stranger.

It made room.

Now joy can sit beside grief
at the same table.

Sometimes I laugh.
Sometimes I cry.

Neither one
asks the other to leave.

Love does not disappear
because the person is gone.

It changes its shape.

Like a river reaching the sea
it becomes something wider.

I do not wait at the window anymore.
I do not ask the past
to answer me.

What was given
is still here.

I carry it
as I walk forward.

The seasons continue
as they always have.

Winter, spring, summer again.

And the heart,
if it lives long enough,

learns this small miracle:

it can hold sorrow
and still recognize
the light.