POETRY | Morning

8:42pm.

Early March. Summer doesn't know it's over yet.

The night I send the poem prompts to the best poet I know - and that's exactly what he is - I'm pretending in myself to be doing better than I am.

It's a prompt set titled 'The Light That Waits'. I don't know what I'm going to do yet. Or how. This version of me feels too deep in the tunnel still; you know it's bad when you actually wouldn't mind if it was a train at a certain point. A train would at least be...something.

I keep waiting for the grief to shift even a little. But the reality is it's still too soon. It's in my bones. As present with me as if I had tar in my lungs, from the moment I open my eyes. This sadness...the anger...it's all a bell. One that's tolled hard and too often over the last year, and if I'm honest, these days it never goes quiet long enough for me to remember what good silence sounds like. I don't even know anymore if good silence is a thing.

So I fill the gap. I boil the kettle. Again. Get down another cup in the laminate quiet for another tea on another day. I move through the hours at the moment like a wind up toy whose music box doesn't play quite right anymore but it still makes her twirl. I think about people I know are waiting in the day ahead of me, of the things they're demanding of me, and how I don't want to say out loud yet that it feels like they're trying to crush the visible bits of my spirit still left. If I had to guess, because the powder of what's left would be less confronting for them to look at. Easier to sweep up. Or under a rug.

I'm not a stone in the shoe for them these days, I think. They think I'm a stone but I'm not. I'm a goddamn bone shard.

The steams rises steadily from the cup in front of me, and I ask when it all stops but the answer is the same. It feels like never. There's always bills to pay, right? Adulting to do. Ghastly polite masks to wear and wipe off again at the end of the day so the rest of the world doesn't get too uncomfortable in business hours when God forbid it catches a glimpse of your pain. It's a ridiculous reminder I have to set for myself at the moment - that I didn't ask for it. For any of this.

My friend - my clever, bright, gifted, warm, bold, brilliant friend - has been gone for 14 days. Ended. She is permanently elsewhere in the universe now, while I am still...here. Haunting my own house. I feel like a bruise life won't stop punching. Cancer, I think, not for the first time, can absolutely go fuck itself.

The prompts, though, sit with me like marbles in the palm of my heart. How. How do I pull a poem about light out of this dark? The news, the incoming text message threads, the front pages of papers I see but don't buy...they're all full of things and stories and people dying, ending...so often unjustly. The irony isn't lost on me how alive I feel in comparison.

A memory buffers, recent. Me sitting in the living room the other day with another friend who moved in at the end of last year. She - loudly kind, unabashedly, magnificently philosophical and wholly alive - made a joke I laughed at so unexpectedly hard that it physically hurt. It was all so dad joke dumb and stupid wonderful until I realised how long it had been since I laughed last. I learned in that moment that laughter is a car with working brakes, capable of stopping. Capable of slamming to a halt.

In the present, the tyre marks of that weird reality somehow still fresh in my head, I ask myself the same questions I did then. When had joy become a stranger in my body? Why does happiness feel like some jolly, entitled, oblivious Ghost-of-Christmas-Past stranger turning up unexpectedly on the doorstep of my ribs, with too much baggage, while I have so little room at the moment for literally anything that's not a coping mechanism? It's barely even Autumn.

And why is guilt here, pretending to be joy's shadow? Like, fuck that guy. And who taught me and when that there was shame to be felt in smiling in the company of a good thought, even when the rest of world feels like a bag of broken bones we all keep trying to shove into novelty stockings and pretend like it's okay? Like we're okay. Nothing is okay.

But that's not exactly true, is it. The prompts, I think, mug hot in my palms, are more than okay. They're beautiful. They're kind. They're hopeful. And whatever you write will go into the care of a friend who understands, when it's done.

I close my eyes, trying to make room for a beautiful thing to come to me. If it wants. I have no idea that I'm about to go through the ugliest, most redefining time of my life in the months ahead. I don't know in the moment that this is the last oblivion I will know for a long while. I can't tell you if I'd have appreciated it more if I had.

Here's what matters though. No one ever tells you that sometimes being a poet is like sitting in tall grass at dusk, millpond-still with your eyes closed, your mind open and heart hoping that some untamed and tender thought is just nearby, waiting for you to be calm enough to let it close.

Because that's the other thing that's permanently, stubbornly alive in me. Even though I can never tell what they'll form in the end.

The words. Wild, raw, lovely things, always trying to get out and build their kingdoms out of letters and lines.

They're impatient. So I let them.

I don’t know

if I have come down,

or if,

when the sun comes -

softly, as the feet of a friend

down a timber hallway -

it is just that

I am risen.

The ocean of last night has slipped back,

made a dawn retreat

from the shoreline of the morning.

The unwritten tide

a constant thing, paved with clouds;

dusk on the desk at the break of my day.

True story, I say,

quietly in the soft halls of my lungs -

in the company of palms

pressed to the pulsing, blushed architecture

of this lived not existed life -

there is a wisdom always between

the open mouthed kisses

of my tea steaming:

that I, even I,

was worth the coming home, too.

Heaven is just belonging

in the end,

not a dreaming but

actual;

stained glass with purpose, set.

I am a soft, created thing

known by Creator

as cup knows the saucered

tender curve for which it was carved,

as its own.

Love here is simple

and rest;

I wake having slept on the shoulder of hours

which knew then

and now,

how to kindly hold my head;

they cared to remain

when grief in her cynicism and pain

was breaking

plates like promises

on the kitchen floor.

But no more.

I make the peace of this day,

that day,

like a garden bed,

a daily bread

beneath the grey,

the crushed soap song of rain.

My heart.

My heart is the dirt of quiet things

cradling seeds

in cool, rich solitude to bloom

where nothing is too soon,

only right on time.

I think of loves I loved

who let me go,

who remain in mine

like dropped blossoms and fallen oaks

on my forest floor,

waiting to be reborn in the canopy.

And I am reminded

here, in the company

of the good ground

from which we both came,

that sometimes

the most beautiful riots

of which I am one -

and maybe so were they -

first require hiding

in order to return

for uncut colours to be witnessed,

and in their fullness,

earned.

© Erin Brown 2026