American Life in Poetry

Grief can endure a long, long time. A deep loss is very reluctant to let us set it aside, to push it into a corner of memory.

Here an Arkansas poet, Andrea Hollander Budy, gives us a look at one family’s adjustment to a death.

For Weeks After the Funeral

The house felt like the opera,

the audience in their seats, hushed, ready,

but the cast not yet arrived.

And if I said anything

to try to appease the anxious air, my words

would hang alone like the single chandelier

waiting to dim the auditorium, but still

too huge, too prominent, too bright, its light

announcing only itself, bringing more

emptiness into the emptiness.