Visitors

mothergrief and the visiting of seasons

Visitors

In spring a hummingbird
flew 
into my home
they touched the flowers 
on the table
with their gaze.

All summer long the 
big bumble bees tumble
in with the winds
then leave
for places 
where the pollen
is thicker.

Now that it’s fall
the leaves 
come to visit,
dry-winged bats
that enter
and linger,

until I pick them up
to put them back outside
in the home 
of the world.


When winter arrives
it stays
for as 
long 
as it pleases.

I wrote this poem years ago. Even though I never touched it afterwards—I still think about it. I think about it when I bring the tired honeybees back outside at the end of a long day. Or when I sweep the straggling fall leaves from the halls of our house. I think about it when the seasons come to me, come into me, and there’s no helping their arrival.

Poetry is its own kind of visitor. It comes to you, though you, and will visit again and again until you recognize which season has arrived.

The poem was partly inspired by Rumi’s The Guest House, where it’s the visitor who stays, and does not leave, who has the most to teach us.

Grief is like this. So is pain. So are all deep feelings.

This week has felt like one of deep mothergrief. The private turnings of the new moon eclipse yesterday, the public shock of a world witnessing pain after pain.

When I was a child I thought by the time you became a mother you were impervious to the deeper tides of life—fear, anxiety, longing, depression, yearning or pain. But it’s the exact opposite.

The wellspring of motherfeelings are deep. There’s sadness and then there’s mothersadness. There’s shock and then there’s mothershock.

There’s grief, and then there’s the grief of a mother who knows what it means to love with her entire being. Who can look at every person on Earth and remember that they were once a child who needed to be held. Who cannot look away from the preciousness of life, not for a single moment.

I don’t have any answers. But today I opened my door to the winds that came down from the ceramic blue sky and watched a leaf sail through every opening in the canopy to find their way to the Earth.

Today I let the grief come, and stay for as long as it pleases.

To stay—until the next visitor appears.