When you don’t know what to say*

Sad things can’t be explained.

You fumble with words, a fat-fingered, inexpert child

struggling with buttons and shoelaces.

Language is inadequate, a feather

trying to knock in a nail.

The tilt of your head is a cliché, 

in the face of the inconsolable. What is left

are your eyes and ears, your hands: a garden weeded, 

a dinner cooked and the dishes cleared soundlessly away.

What is left is sitting with the silence

or the howling

and remembering not to say, but to ask.

*first line taken from The Years by Alex Dimitrov