(for National Grief Awareness Day)

•••
I want to praise things that cannot last…
I want to praise everything brief and finite.
—poet Barbara Crooker
•••

Praise the too-soon gone:
the leaves that decorated spring
with their green hands months ago,
brittling in the last days of summer,
soon turning to detritus underfoot
as fall falls,

as the year itself soon ends—
another one almost gone.
Where, we always ask,
did it go?

Like the ones we imagine gone,
no longer embodied because
we don’t see them walking
through our lives—

we think them vanished,
when, like the leaves,
like all the days of our lives,
we have drunk them deep,
absorbed them into our cells
where they now live.

They never disappear,
just as we have embedded
ourselves into the loved ones
we will one day leave behind—

we, the too-soon gone,
who will turn from mourning
into the mourned.