Tag Archives: poetry

Grief by Land and Sea

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Every day since my best friend got pregnant I have become a master researcher in all things pregnancy, babies, baby safety, baby parties and Jesus. Especially Jesus, because I was appointed God Mother.

In fact, I downloaded one of those baby apps just to see what size her baby was every week. I often think back in amazement on how he started out the size of a sprinkle on a donut. At the start of the week I would send a text message. “Do you want to know how big baby is this week?” One week I even sent her a strawberry shirt to lounge in with a note, “This week baby is a strawberry! I am so berry excited!”

You see, I take my role very seriously because I am not having children of my own. Being invited to take part in such an important piece of a tiny human’s journey (their relationship with Papa Dios) has been the #1 privilege of my life.

In April we received a fatal diagnosis for my God Son that would result in almost instantaneous loss at his birth. In that moment I realized my role would be abridged. I had to shift my focus to getting him to heaven alongside my greatest friends of all and praying over all of this new, terrible and terrifying journey.

My God Son was born into heaven this August.

I cannot ever accurately put into words the grief associated with watching someone you love so much being coping with the loss of their own baby. The grief of months of preparation and planning and future building that seem to come to an abrupt end. The grief that ripples through the entire family.

The Rail Ride of Grief

It’s as if you’re on a train and you can’t get off of the train no matter how many stops it makes before yours. No matter how much speed it gains, time spend in holding on the side rails or how many stops it makes at places you would rather go instead, you’re stuck in the train car, watching through the windows, until your stop.

At some point it feels like you may never get off the train.

Until all of a sudden you do, you’re at the station. You have approximately 10 seconds to gather your bags and jump off all the while you find yourself pushed onto the platform instead. When you look back the train is gone. When you look down you’ve left most of your luggage.

At the station it seems like nothing you could have packed would have prepared you anyways, the weather is both too hot and too cold, it’s raining hard but the sun is out. You expected to find someone waiting for you, but they’re not here. You’ll have to walk the rest of the way home or call an Uber.

In my case, I decided I’d rather walk. We all know how unpredictable ride sharing can be.

Unused Furniture

If I’m honest with myself, every time I walk in my garage I cry just a little. At our house we prepared for our friends to not have to travel with much for us to spend time with them and Daniel. There is a little white high chair alongside all my stray boxes and decor. The chair gathers dust while it waits for him, while we all wait for him. He will never sit in it and that is something someone can never truly wrap their heart around.

Since August it is as if a part of my brain has been on hold. Waiting as well and gathering dust while we all wait for him. Hoping for the missing piece in our lives to click into place from somewhere. Perhaps holding to unload the new sadness that often feels like a case of broken celebratory champagne bottles in my heart. Maybe for answers or understanding, but I know some things pass all understanding.

A Healthy Respect for the Ocean

I have spent this past week on a cruise ship with my husband and our dear friends.

Each time I get on a boat I repeat to myself, “I have a healthy respect for the ocean.” As in, I’m not afraid of the ocean, but I’m aware of its depths, occasional roughness and its role as home to very large animals.

During this trip, while I look out at the vast, blue, deep ocean, I think of my own God Mother and how I throw up a hang loose sign just for her in all my photos while I enjoy life just as she instructed me to while she was on Earth with us. I think of Daniel, who I will not experience these things with on Earth.

I’ve also spent my fair share of time in the ocean while exploring. Just this week I kissed a stingray equal in size to myself and snorkeled a beautiful underwater national park.

The Beach of Grief

I rounded out my ocean time on one of my favorite private beaches. I find myself thinking that, over time, maybe grief can be like a beach.

The waves can be the overwhelming moments of grief with ebbs of everyday life, the sand at shore can be the happy moments or ways I cope or people who have loved me through these experiences, I will be just beyond the breaking wave on the soft sand and my sadness can remain the broken glass.

Some days, I know the grief will form in huge swells and my sadness will slam over the sand, my support system. The glass will spill over onto me where I sit on the land causing even more pain, but the tide will come back up again and take the glass back out into the waters.

Over time, the sharp, broken edges of my sadness will be worn away and whittled down into smoothness by the shores I’ve built. The memories of this sadness will hurt when they hurtle at full speed into the sand, but they will be more beautiful to remember and cherish, just like sea glass.

Today I am reminded that our darkest sadness and the brightest joys coexist every day in our temporary home on Earth. I am also reminded of the promise that one day we will all be together again without sadness or pain in our true home heaven. I take comfort in God’s promise to us. I give my sadness over to Jesus for him to turn into sea glass.

“Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.” Matthew 5:4

XOXO,

NBNealie

Poetry Thursday: As…We

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This is As…We by yours truly.
I’ve never been able to get this on paper.

But today I did.

So, As…We a study of innocents and the heart.

As young children,
The children who believed sickness was only for a few days;
The children who knew nothing of death;
The children who believed every fair tale Walt Disney, or dad, or mom would say.
We smiled, and believed we could do anything.

As kids,
The kids who feared no cut or scrape;
The kids who went off to school and learned new things;
The kids who only needed a simple playground to escape.
We laughed, and brushed off trivial things.

As preteens,
The preteens who learned weird things and turned red in group talks about sex;
The preteens who wrote secrets in new journals;
The preteens who got their first boyfriend or girlfriend, and maybe their first ex.
We sighed and wished we were older.

As teens,
The teens who were offered harder courses and made hard choices and did things like say no to drugs;
The teens who got their first car or job or loves;
The teens who missed simplicity because relationships had escalated to more than hugs.
We frowned, and raised our white flag, and took back our wishes to be older and replaced them with wishes to be young again.

As adults,
The adults who fall in actual love and marry;
The adults who have children and bills and miss our own parents;
The adults who look into our spouses eyes because they are our new escape and a better place to hide when things get scary.
We breathe easy and thank God or who ever that we gave up who we used to be.

As elderly people,
The elderly who know a grandchild’s love;
The elderly who spoke life lessons, and fixed hearts, and talked our own kids through alcohol sex and drugs;
The elderly who held a loved ones hand and maybe it was our spouse or at least someone we made memories with, but they weren’t right beside us, they were somewhere up above.
We felt full and our hearts had grown, and we thank ourselves for growing up.

As a person,
A person who has grown;
A person who has seen unspeakable things;
A person who created a heart made of steal and a way to deal with problems that was all our own.
We thought about how our white flags weren’t a way to quit
but a patch to add on to what we had become.

We see us as us.

XOXO
Nealie

Poetry Thursday: Help Wanted

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There will be other poets but Shane Koyczan and his spoken word poems changed everything for me.

Without further ado “Help Wanted”

I’ll post the link to the spoken one later on.

Everyday, Grandma would come into my room
And I’d hear her say, “Rise and shine.
The world is a window that holds a sign
There’s help wanted somewhere.”
So I rose and I shone.
I put on my shoes and I was gone.

See Grandma bought me my first phone.
She said, “Don’t bother calling the people who care,
Call the people don’t.
Don’t bother calling the people who have taken up a fight,
Call the people who won’t.”

And I learn at a very young age
Where my Grandma’s rage came from.
The entire congregation would nod,
Never ask Grandma about God.

I’d argue with her everyday
All she’d say is, “Go down to the store
Buy some light bulbs,
And when you run out, buy some more.
Because the light at the end of your tunnel needs to be maintained.
You can’t let it be stained by their beliefs are better than your beliefs.
And you can’t agree to disagree, because they’re fucking wrong!”

It’s not the strong who have gotten lazy,
It’s just that your vision is a little hazy.
You’re not sure what you want,
But what you’ve got is all you need.
Falsed greed.

For every hypocritical church goer
Who won’t walk past the beggars
‘Cause they can’t spare a dime.
Grandma said, “Fuck them,
I don’t talk to God ’cause I ain’t got the time.”

And it struck me as strange.
Every time I walked past someone
Who stopped to ask me,
“Hey can you spare some change?”
Because, yes I can, but you see
I don’t carry change around in my back pocket.
I don’t wear it around my neck on a chain in some locket.

I keep change in the tip of my pen.
And it seeps out every now and then,
In spurts of angry ink that make me think,
Maybe the writing on the wall could use a little revision.

Grandma told me, “Stop trying to calculate the difference between people.
People don’t need division.
Gotta stick it together.
Gotta love each other.”

Father, brother, sister, mother, uncles, cousins, aunts,
Forget about the chance, the cheers, the jokes, the jeers.
After 2000 years, you’d think we’d know by now.
Grandma said, “We will only find equality in the number of tears.”

And she was right,
Because I don’t know what injustices you have suffer,
Based size, sex, race, religion,
Or the political pigeon shit on the shoulders of
Us versus them.

Like in Bethlehem,
When a man said, “Hey I could be wrong,
But can’t we all just get along?”
No! So we nailed him to a tree.

See, justice isn’t justice,
It just is.
And I can’t change it,
You can’t change it.
So we’ve just got to try and rearrange it.

And I could offer you this miracle.
A chance to see,
A chance to see what I see.
To see the way that people see me.
Because if seeing is believing,
And you see what I see,
We wouldn’t want to see anymore.

But I’ve got a little surprise in store
For every man who looks upon me with judgment in his eye,
The women who looks upon me with wetness between her thighs.
I’m the world’s greatest overweight lover.

And you might just laugh.
And you might just scoff.
My bones are made from sticks and stones
And names just piss me off.

Grandma told me, “Young man,
You can’t be concerned with what ever it is they’ve got,
Because the only reason they think they’re beautiful
Is the same reason they think you’re not.
And, young man, you have beauty beyond measure.
You are a treasure entrenched in this earth.
You can’t let strangers determine your worth.
Rise and shine!”

So I rose and I shone.
I put on my shoes and I was gone.

See, Grandma bought me my first phone.
She said, “Young man, from time to time,
I too need to smile.
Would you do me a favour and keep me on speed dial?”
Yes, Grandma, I will.

And still, to this day, I can call her up
And hear her say, “It’s a game!
You play, you win.
You play, you lose.
You play!”

“Rise and shine!
The world is a window that holds a sign,
There is help wanted out there, somewhere.
But young man, if you are playing to win,
The first thing you have to do,
Is apply within”

Shane Koyczan and How he Changed my Life. (Announcements/Schedule)

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You might remember Shane from my posts about the “TO THIS DAY PROJECT”.
Since then I have been listening to all of his spoken word poems and let me tell you. His words are just so perfect and beautiful that I want to put my favorite lines into a jar and keep them forever.
I just want all of his lovely spoken thoughts to be mine.

He is the man that first got me thinking that I want to mean what I say. Every last word. As few words as possible while eying my point across. No fluff.

And as I kept listening he touched every corner of my life from my hurt to my happiness to my love to my sadness to my anger to my jealousy.
And I decided that even though that is the path I was headed I decided that I absolutely without a shadow of a doubt have to be a writer.
And so for now I listen very carefully (or read) to the way that people string their words together. And I rearrange them in my mind to make them sound more poetic.

Just letting you inside my mind a bit.

XOXO
Your blogger,

SCHEDULE UPDATE

MONDAY: beginning of the week post (inspirational/thoughts/SPECIFIC TOPIC OF THE WEEK)
WEDNESDAY: life lessons with Nealie
THURSDAY: poems, word vomit, meh
FRIDAY: end of the week post (personal /thought/event)

Loud People and Listening.

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I’m generally loud.
Around my friends I’d talk about myself.
Around people I like to laugh.
Around lovely people I like to talk about anything.

But I realized that no one has really been listening. Or caring. Not even me some days.

So I’ve decided the way to make everyone care even myself is being quiet.

I mean to mean what I say.

But I’m just a silly girl with too many words.

Xoxo