Rupture

Rupture

Grief arrives.
A blunt force invasion.
Forcing its way down your throat and past your chest to rip away a piece of your heart.
Empty.
It feels empty inside, a void. How can such emptiness be so heavy to hold?
The urge to puke.
The instinct to grab, to claw, at what?
Why.
Such shallow breaths.
Such strange thoughts.
A shuddering spirit, forsaken soul.
You can’t swallow, you don’t feel whole.
Rupture.
No matter how many times grief arrives, it stuns me in its wake.
I tremble at what it dares to take.

Poem by

Colleen Elsofany

After many encounters with grief I had to put some words together in an attempt to process what I was experiencing. I am not a poet but often a poem comes to me in overwhelming times, and it flows so freely in those moments but if i tried to write a poem outside of those experiences I dont think I could. I wanted to submit and hopefully share with/for anyone who is, has or continues to hold grief. We often make attempt to make sense of grief from a mental perspective but I think my poem reflects a somatic lens on the experience of traumatic grief.