Posts for June 23, 2026 (page 4)

i come from Irish wakes, a terribly misunderstood tradition
psychologically ~ a wise gift from my Irish ancestors
just lost someone ~ grief exhausted to the core
the house fills up with people, tea made, and whiskey starts flowing  

by midnight a few relatives & close friends yarn stories of the deceased
whole room bursts into contagious laughter ~ spilling into saturating tears
then crying and laughing again

and just before the wee hours an argument breaks out over something no one remembers
a grudge ~ begins to stiffly form ~ not sure if its’ the drink or just emotions running high

the wake is not Irish irreverence ~ it is community
holding one of its members through the worst night of their life
it fills the dark with warmth ~ and refuses to allow grief to exist in silent isolation

some believe a wake evolved from a pagan ritual practice of ‘waking the dead’  

traditional belief has it the wake evolved from an Irish “faire”
meaning to watch over & never leave the body alone
from the moment of death to burial — someone is always present

Family and neighbors come without being asked
they keep coming ~ family doesn’t have to cook
doesn’t have to make decisions or have to be alone with their loss

community arrives takes over and stays
stories told at our family wakes sewed us even closer together
these stories were told retold & even told today

laughter dispels grief ~ story brings relief
of all the complicated human flaws and forms
a Wake is not the flattened saint ~ formal mourning can induce
a hearty lot to help make death survivable invented the Irish wake

I shall never forget my dear Uncle Tim’s Wake
dressed in his buttoned down sweater jacket ~ a tucked in flannel plaid shirt
appeared to be sleeping ~ too young to be dead
his opened wooden casket placed in the dimly lit living room of the home he built by himself
I approached the casket ~ stood quietly looking upon the body
felt him out of the casket, standing next to me ~ his arms around my shoulders

Poetry is a language. To speak it
you must be fluent in the languages
of those you love, be they Mary Oliver, 
William Stafford, Seamus Heaney

Elizabeth Bishop. You must remember
how the scent of lilac tastes creamy 
on your tongue, how words like 
serendipity and archetype frizzle 

through your brain. Keep 
the conversation going, even when
you feel you can’t keep up, when
you’re afraid you’ll never have more

than a tourist’s dim understanding 
of the dense richness of the text. 

On our old road, for years, the ditches
cut their little pleasure paths,
and we built around them
as they followed the sweeps and pulls of land
into the bottoms and ravines
that fed the rain into limestone.

A conduit—a culvert—
a dark polypropylene creek
collects all it can carry unseen, between
the rows and roads we live on.

It leaves—
after it’s done its damage—doesn’t stagnate,
drops through rock to the Rockcastle,
into chambers never to be seen.
It cuts under everything

til the water resurfaces a county over–
renamed, gushes forth carrying minerals.
Lost ditch, leached from every secret thing
it has passed through.

The disembodied violin is a throat
scratching claws into the plush
hide of the chair the morning a purple
spot in the corner I turn my back
to the sun

Above where this necklace falls on my chest,
I say, because instead truthfully measuring here 
where my third rib juts exposed from the body
of my visible sternum is where I want my hair
to hit when straightened and pulled forward
would be mood-killing, inappropriately morbid.

Artificial strawberry blonde falls, snipped to graze 
the silver wings of my thunderbird pendant. Levity
lets my head become so light it almost untethers
from my spine, floats without the burden of those
four inches, the last two years when accounting 
for quarterly trimming. Two years spent thinning.

Before it was called Lake Richardson,
it was Molechunkamunk.

A name that sounds
less like ownership

and more like weather.

It means “stream in a deep ravine”
in Abenaki.

I think about this
whenever a place
gets renamed
into something
recognizable to the people
who took it.

As though difference
is a problem to be solved

rather than a way
to love other people.

The Rangeley Lakes hold
a particular kind of quiet.

Not absence.

But density.

Water that has learned
how to be still
without forgetting
it is moving.

On the surface,
boats trace small corrections.

Fish revise their routes
underneath.

The lake continues
whatever it was doing
before language arrived.

It was once a river
at the bottom of a ravine.

A moving system
with its own grammar of direction.

Then it was dammed—

for fishing,

for logging,

for control of flow.

Each purpose
arriving like a new explanation
laid over the same body of water.

Now it generates electricity.

Converted motion.

Stored pressure
released as light elsewhere.

The land itself
partly owned by a hydropower company
that, ironically,
keeps it undeveloped.

Allows it to return
to its original wilderness.

As though the final form
of extraction

is silence.

Molechunkamunk
sounds like a system
older than exploitation.

Older than maps
that pretend to finish
the world.

I try to say it
the way it might have been said
before it was written down.

Molechunkamunk.

Like a body
remembering
a forgotten motion.

Recognition
is not the same
as possession.

Something can be known
without being marked.

I stand at the edge
of the water
and imagine
the older name
still existing
beneath the surface,
moving slowly
under the new one,
being whispered by
the birch trees and
driftwood
lining the shore.

The trees remember
the ravine below.

And if by staying I can

A toddler unpacks
the diaper bag, everything
must go, until we find
the cheese. 

For Tonea Nicole Miller (1998 – 2026)

Hang, hung, hung

Unless found on a tree,
a black woman in Miami,
for Juneteenth hanged.

Lie, lay, lain

No foul play,
the suited substitute
brazenly rules.

Lie, lied, lied.

Apparent suicide,
recycled code for
know your place.

“But at least i got a soul still. Even if I’m in a bad place”- Noah Kahan

my soul will survive,
as the thick bladed grass of spring frosts over
the newly blossomed bluebells wilt beneath my feet.

my bones have weathered storms unrelenting,
my heart burdened grief
with each rib hugged around,
as sure a storm shutter.

even when i’m sure to break
and crack around around the edges

my soul will survive this dusk,
it must.