through

“It’s going to get worse before it gets better.”

You really do think you know.

The haunting, the rabbits
The midnights
The worse

You think you know.

And still, here come
For you, unprepared,
The thousand screams
NO!

They come again.
Each time, never prepared.
It gets worse.

The imagination, memory,
Must try to help us
By softening the things in long-ago hindsight,
Making them poetry.
And still you think:
Yes, I know grief.
Yes, I have done this before.
And you have.

And yet
You haven’t.