Funerals | Teen Ink

Funerals MAG

October 16, 2011
By NineMuses PLATINUM, Pelham, New York
NineMuses PLATINUM, Pelham, New York
22 articles 2 photos 10 comments

Favorite Quote:
You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
-Jack London


I. I was two and a half.
I remember black clothes and tall people,
family people, shoveling dirt down a
deep, deep hole, and my mother
standing in the back of the crowd,
holding my hand just-too-tight
and letting her tears for her mother
drip down
onto my bewildered face.

II. I saw Felicia
the Fish turn into a
magical orange spiral,
glinting in the whirlpool.
My five-year-old head craned
for a better look.

III. When our urban friends buried their beloved
guinea pig, Fifi, in a shallow grave in our
frozen backyard, I was seven
and studying.

IV. At ten,
I watched my mother
and aunt and uncle
symbolically rend pieces of black cloth
they had pinned to their clothes.
I wished that I had
something to rip, too.
That time I also sent a
shovel of dirt
down the deep, deep hole
to where my grandfather lay,
in the Jewish tradition, and, a year later,
placed a
cold, icy pebble
on his gravestone.


The author's comments:
A poem of growth through loss and the evolution of grief with age.

Similar Articles

JOIN THE DISCUSSION

This article has 1 comment.


on Jun. 1 2012 at 7:28 pm
mindless_dreaming BRONZE, Wyckoff, New Jersey
1 article 0 photos 43 comments

Favorite Quote:
"May make my heart as a millstone, set my face as a flint, Cheat and be cheated, and die: who knows? We are ashes and we are dust." -Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 'Maud'

Beautiful....