Even Loss Can Be Beautiful
Loss comes quietly.
It surprises us as we look in the mirror, turn on the news,
answer the phone, open an email, look out the window
or spin around.
What was once a forest of golden leaves has faded into a
grove of muted browns and empty cathedrals.
The pure white of snow has been stained by the mud of
spring, no longer inviting.
Some lost things are found to have taken on new shapes:
a mitten without a thumb, a feather with a broken spine,
ashes with no fire.
They ask us to see the beauty in being broken, messy. Let
them surprise you with what they have to offer.
Let once shining blue eyes, now dulled by all they have
witnessed reopen in wonder.
Loss becomes rivers accepting the melting ice, forests
resurrecting into sanctuaries of green light and new life
awakening from a long winter nap.
In the way of the seasons, there is no word for loss, only
a continuous ebb and flow, a cycle of death and rebirth
where beauty can be found in the tiniest flaws.
*
Autumn in the Rear View Mirror
Our small lives rise and fall as
another November recedes in the
rear view mirror.
It has been a season of few mercies.
Bones worn down to the marrow and
hope vanishing like smoke from an
extinguished match.
The sun’s light grows softer as
the days grow shorter and shadows
lengthen. There is a new chill in
the air.
Night drapes us in her black robe
before the chime of the evening
church bells ring a call to vespers.
The trees are bare and the north
wind carries us inside.
Inside where we sit by the fire
dreaming of things that cannot last.
*
Karen A VandenBos was born on a warm July morn in Kalamazoo, MI. She can be found unleashing her imagination in three online writing groups and her writing has been published in Lothlorien Poetry Journal, The Rye Whiskey Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Blue Heron Review and others.
