The Nature of Mourning

It’s the silence of the quiet moments
that brings painful, shuddering awareness
that things are no longer the way they were
and never will be quite that way again.

It’s the hollowness of routine gestures,
which once expressed love so casually
that they were as unconscious as breathing,
that echoes sudden death’s meaninglessness.

It’s the emptiness of the vacant rooms —
the pressure of a vacuum — that draws
the body’s hydration out through the eyes
and suffocates what was accustomed joy.

It’s the unexpected desolation
that passively inflicts deepest anguish.

By: James Ph. Kotsybar

James Ph. Kotsybar is the first poet honored by NASA to be published to another planet, with verse orbiting Mars and appearing in the Hubble Mission Log. Published across the U.S. and six countries, he won NASA’s Centaur 50th Anniversary Art Challenge and The State Poetry Society of Michigan award. He has performed internationally, staged large narrative poems in L.A., and created R.A.I.L. (Readers And Interested Listeners). a poetry project connecting poets and audiences from Japan to Santa Barbara, including an onstage collaboration under Allen Ginsberg’s direction.