Sorrow Shares My World Poem by Helen Gaudin

You lie in the dark
Quiet beneath the ground
Held in an earthly embrace
Insensate
Nothing touches your cold flesh
I stand looking at the enveloping earth
Saturated with sorrow

Wrapped in shadows of doubt
That life can still exists inside of me
My heart hardens
As if made of stone
I cannot see beyond this grief saturated moment
Sorrow darkens my soul

Matter from earth, matter back to earth
A connection that has never been abandoned
My grief has me yearning
My soul reaching out to join you
Under the weight of sorrow

Around me is the enigmatic, eternal, waiting silence
Like the sphinx blindly staring across the desert, unknowable
For a moment I see through the eyes of the dead
To eternity
Reluctant acceptance slowly rises
Through the curdled emotions that push against the edges of my skin
I endure the ache of sorrow

Within me rises the deep understanding that it is not my time
The living world is still waiting within my reach
I still have to withstand all the midnight hours
To survive the dark before the dawn
Now that Death has cut the ties
And sorrow shares my world