Write three things your grief feels like today. Is it a monster? If so, what kind—describe it, complete with smell and sound. Maybe it’s an element: fire, water, wind, earth? A broken toy? A room? A celebrity?
If your grief could talk, what would it say? Don’t worry about whether your metaphors/similes (a simile is just a type of metaphor, by the way, despite what your middle school English teacher might have told you) “go with” this step. In fact, don’t worry if any of these steps go together. It’s a poem—and poems can use what we call “the lyric leap.” That means you don’t have to get us from point A to point D; we can leap there!
What would you like to say back to your grief? Would it be a shout, a whisper, would you have to write it on a slip of paper and put it in a bottle to be dropped in the sea?
Let’s say you and your grief are going somewhere together. What vehicle would you be in? Would it just be the two of you, or would others be there, too?
Finally, where are you going? A place on earth or in the universe, an imaginary place, a time?
The point is: when you can articulate something about your grief, give it a shape and a voice, give yourself a voice, you are making meaning of it. You are directly engaging in your own process of being and becoming. I can’t make your grief go away; no one can do that. It’s part of you, and it’s part of being human. We are all beautiful mosaics of loss.