Poem: Grieving

Grieving

By Eleanor Fisher
QuailBellMagazine.com

Sling shoots you forward into elderly age
And you gradually, or sometimes not so
gradually, will be shot back to now
What is right now. Its own age, whatever that is.
For a while you feel everyone around you
by how much they are dying.
Even, of course! the disappointing people.
And gradually you see people like
a big blanket. They are rough and soft.
Sheep’s wool.
And gradually you once more see everyone as
yourself –which is infinite, dreamy
powerful and unpowerful.
Through grieving you’ve been shot out there and back.
Not like a basketball or a cannon ball or a boomerang.
It’s like you’re a seashell, and you’re being tumbled
in the waves and you’re becoming clean.
But the rejecting and accepting of water into your cells
gives you motion sickness and nearly throw up.

Eleanor Fisher earned a B.A. in English from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2012. As a college student, two of her poems were published in Poictesme. In her senior year, her story “Reverie in la Pietà” received second place for the English department’s fiction contest. After graduating, she worked as an intern for Adriana Trigiani, who lives in Manhattan and has written a long list of novels, as well as writing for “The Cosby Show” and “It’s a Different World.” Eleanor has studied and written in Glasgow, Scotland, and Florence, Italy.