Tag Archives: Grief

An Invitation to Sink Down into a Poem and Overhear a Heck of a Healing Chat between the Titanic and American Poet and Performer Laura Brown-Lavoie

April 13, 2020 – 11:53 am

If I break a leg, I’ll go to a doctor. If I break my heart or if the world breaks my spirit, I will go to a poet…… The healing power of art is not a rhetorical fantasy… For some, music, for some, pictures, for me, primarily, poetry…..cuts through noise and hurt, opens the wound […]

By Richard Osler | Posted in Poetry | Also tagged , | Comments (0)

The Answer to the Question “Yes” – The Whimsy and the Wise Words for a Time of Shatter – Four Poems by American Poet Gregory Orr

March 26, 2020 – 3:58 pm

The last love poem I will ever write…. Will contain an invention for turning ant’s tears Into hummingbird wings. It will hold every Elegy the night sky ever wrote for the moon. It will reveal the answer to the question “Yes.” It will feature a rosebush that grew naturally Into the shape of a woman, […]

By Richard Osler | Posted in Poetry | Also tagged | Comments (2)

Grief – Three Poems – Dickman, Stone & Inverarity

September 22, 2019 – 2:10 pm

Grief When grief comes to you as a purple gorilla you must count yourself lucky. You must offer her what’s left of your dinner, the book you were trying to finish you must put aside, and make her a place to sit at the foot of your bed, her eyes moving from the clock to […]

By Richard Osler | Posted in Poetry | Also tagged , , | Comments (0)

Let Poetry Speak It – Grief but Also Happiness -For My Friends Laura and Walt – Their Son Killed in an Accident

April 30, 2018 – 5:18 pm

Meals of Grief & Happiness 1 I believe in the tears of an elephant. How they stamp the ground and forget they are in musth— panting—and cinnamon shrubs or piles of sugarcane can’t tempt them to stop their cycle of grief. I believe I the broken heart of an elephant. When a companion dies, I […]

By Richard Osler | Posted in Poetry | Also tagged | Comments (0)

Christian Wiman and Greg Orr — How To Lighten Grief’s Gravity

October 26, 2014 – 5:41 pm

I sometimes think art is useless in the face of extreme suffering, but then I remember Miklos Radnoti, Paul Celan, Anna Akhmatova, or Mandelstam—and I bow my head (to them) in awe. I suppose I do believe that the greatest art consoles a wound that it creates, that art can give you the capacity to […]

By Richard Osler | Posted in Poetry | Also tagged , , | Comments (4)

The Black Dog Speaks – Poetry and Depression – The Robin Williams’ Aftershock

August 17, 2014 – 3:11 pm

                                Depression in Winter There comes a little space between the south side of a boulder and the snow that fills the woods around it. Sun heats the stone, reveals a crescent of bare ground: brown ferns, and tufts of […]

By Richard Osler | Posted in Poetry | Also tagged , , , , | Comments (14)

Just What the Doctor Ordered – Poems That Make Grown Men Cry

April 27, 2014 – 11:34 pm

  If I break my leg, I’ll go to a doctor, If I break my heart or of the world breaks my spirit, I will go to a poet. Jeanette Winterson, The Times, January 2007 It has an attention grabber title: Poems That Make Grown Men Cry. And happily for readers the title lives up […]

By Richard Osler | Posted in General, Poetry | Also tagged , , , , , | Comments (6)