Skip to main content

Shadow of Grief

Shadow grief...


Ideas casting shadows across mindscape.
Figures of phantoms and reality.


Covid-19 stark, glaring.
Imagining 27 kilo bases, unthinkable rising death statistics.
Shadowed faces, masking tight lips.


Emotions responding
Tapping survival instincts
Ramping up heightened sensitivities
Shadow-fear lengthening penumbra of horror.

Numbers are people.
Ghastly shadows stacking up one on another.
Mute our collective grief, people do die everyday,
Do they die at this rate per day? Dancing headlines--
Yesterday’s toll, the bells don’t tell. Today’s dead swelling.


Some draw air deeply thoughtlessly exhaling---
Others fighting drowning sipping---at last breath becomes air---forever.
The lonely longing digital shadow arms embracing loved ones across the chasms.
Human nearness and touch a misty memory.
Dark multiplying gliding shadowy specters of terror and aloneness.
Young and old slipping beyond reach.


Suffocating lungs do not really breathe. Mechanical ventilators are insufficient.
Shadowy promises of more resources that don’t appear in time.
Starved vending machines of time cannot dispense what’s required.
The hospital sundial points the exact time: a time already too late.
Time pulses while more pass, and even more wait in cue.


Beauty is encrusted in the shadows of this great horror.
Delicate shadows may someday fall across calmer minds
Lengthened shadow of time is needed, a much longer span.
Memories of loved ones lost may beckon rekindling glowing memories.
Now we just stare. Today is just too raw.


Internal shadows stirring our inner worlds churn in chaos.
Too much has changed too quickly. Securities lie smashed.
Who we are sliding away. After all we survive, at least now;
Why us? They were us, but now no more.


Searching shelter the dregs of another draught bitter on our tongues,
Resilience glimmers only in the mirror in the corner;
Flickers in masked-faces---shadows of what we were.


Today's struggles shift so slightly into hope-filled triumphs.
Spring unfolding, we still await that flicker of hope:


Shadow terror fading.


---by Lee Denzler April 7, 2020

Comments

Post a Comment

Speak your mind.....

Popular posts from this blog

1-28 of 104 Rational Maxims to Control Anxious Thinking

Dr. Albert Ellis: 104 Rational Maxims to Control My anxiousThinking .  Copied from How To Control Your Anxiety Before It Controls You (pages 190-205) Minimizing my absolutistic   musts, shoulds, aughts, and demands and the irrational beliefs that go with them   1.       I will  watch my unconditional, absolutistic musts and change them into strong preferences, such as "I would very much like to do well and be approved by others, but I don't have to do so and my worth as a person doesn't depend on doing anything!" 2.       I will watch my overgeneralizations and make them more concrete: "If I fail at something important, I won't always fail and may frequently succeed." 3.       I will watch my awfulizing.  "It's bad to lose out on something I really want, but it's not awful or horrible.  There's a good chance I'll get it later, but if I never do, it is just very dep...
1 comment
Read more

Katherine Stewart's "The Good News Club"

  Put on your to-read list.  I could not believe all the connections between organizations that I'm familiar with!  For me, as interesting as the CEF's Good News Clubs are, most interesting are the connections of the heavy hitter "Christian Nationalists" behind the story of the Good News Clubs and especially the fall out of the US Supreme Court's ruling in Good News Clubs v. Milford Central School (2001).   Page 251- 252, does not mention ACE, but it reads:    "The campaign to remove children from public schools is quickly gathering steam.  A substantial number of fundamentalist parents have already cast their votes silently, by bringing their children home.  Between 1999 and 2007, homeschooling shot up by 74 percent, to over 1.5 million children, representing approximately 3 percent of all school-age children in the United States--a figure that is undoubtedly higher today.  The largest part of that growth came from pare...
Post a Comment
Read more

I am

A copy of a post to my fellow gay fathers who journey with me. -------------------- Hello all. I'm doing pretty well. My partner is facing a concerning cancer diagnosis, and I keep doing my own internal work. I like to do exercises that spur my internal growth. Here is one that I found challenging and perhaps even helpful after taking some defenses down. I'd put the book down for a good while, and perhaps Blackwolf & Gina Jones' ideas on internal growth are not for all, but I felt a sense of triumph this morning, as I did some re-framing. In-spite of wading through considerable non-sense, I did tap into something that is real for me. (I tend not to read in this specific spiritual pop psychology genre. Far too often, for me, it has side-tracked me from facing reality as it is, and perhaps old mis-guided attempts at self-improvement did have a net benefit of helping me figure some things out. For my own reasons, harder sciences, better researched ideas, satisfy...
Post a Comment
Read more