My Sorrow is My Sorrow
by Valentina Gnup
If dreams were lightning
and thunder were desire,
this old house would have burnt down
a long time ago.
—John Prine
Sheltering alone is not shelter—we were born to be each other’s shelter.
Your voice would be church bells.
My students apologize for mentioning their losses during the quarantine.
I tell them we have a right to our sorrow.
I have been wrong so much in my life, but my truest line remains—
what we want is so small, but it is what we want.
It’s my thirty-first day without touching another human.
I rolled up a comforter in bed last night and lay next to it, like a body.
In New York, they are burying unclaimed bodies in trenches.
Unclaimed bodies.
The world slowed down and the sky turned the deepest blue.
People in India say the air is so clear they can almost see God.
I miss the crossing guard I passed each day on my way home from school.
He would bow to everyone who waited at his stop sign.
When I saw that kind old man bowing,
I could almost see God.
Image by Stuart Buck is a visual artist and award-winning poet living in North Wales. His art has been featured in several journals, as well as gracing the covers of several books. His third poetry collection, Portrait of a Man on Fire, is forthcoming from Rhythm & Bones Press in November 2020. He is the art editor for kanstellation magazine and available for commissions all year round. He can be contacted via Twitter or E-Mail
Valentina Gnup won the Lascaux Poetry Prize in 2019; she won the Rattle Reader’s Choice Award in 2015; she won the Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Award from the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation in 2011, and she won the Joy Harjo Poetry Award from Cutthroat Journal of the Arts in 2009. Her poems have appeared in many literary journals. She lives in Oakland, CA and teaches high school English.
Beautiful.
I feel this moving, deeply soulful poem. Thank you Valentina for your heartfelt voice.