Grief is feminine. I greet her, an old acquaintance
with whom I grew up, grew askew
who pulled at me my entire youth, dragged me
into a bottomless darkness. So often I fell.
Sometimes I would lie there, paralyzed by a fear
that seemed to come from nowhere, and yet so real.
L’enfer c’est les autres but hell is heaven
compared to what sometimes rages in my chest.
So often, I bent to her whims
young malleable elastic
at times no more than liquid mass.
Even now, on unguarded days when the sky
seems thinner, she dances before my mind’s eye like a nymph
luring me with her siren song into the deepest blue.
I wet my toes at most, curse
choke and burn her. She who again and again
finds blackened soil to root in.
This battlefield inside me where not even poppies blow.
Nowadays, I only bow to the wind.
(c) Leen Raats
Leen writes 
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