Five Poems on Loss from Anna A. Friedrich
Commissioned Poems from the Rabbit Room Poetry Substack
Using this Substack to Commission New Poems
We have big dreams for this little poetry Substack. It is the latest expression of the Rabbit Room’s larger mission to cultivate and curate works of art, music, and story for the life of the world. We are going to use this platform to:
Discover and promote the work of talented poets.
Gather and mobilize the poetry community at the Rabbit Room.
Use the funds from your paid subscriptions to commission work from poets in the community.
Number Three on that list starts today.
Anna A. Friedrich is lecturing on poetry, pain, and loss at the Rabbit Room’s upcoming Hutchmoot Conference (Oct 5-8). Since she is also a skilled poet, we thought it would be fitting to invite her to become our first poet commissioned by the Rabbit Room Substack.
Anna has offered us five beautiful and subtle poems that live in the land of the theme of loss and grief. I’d say “enjoy them,” but that is not the sort of thing you do with this theme or these poems, except in the sense that there is a kind of joy that comes from experiencing difficult truths stated with craft.
Make yourself a cup of tea and let the poems lead you slowly into whatever goodness, truth, and beauty they hold for you.
Also, if this topic speaks to where you are right now, take a look at Every Moment Holy Volume 2: Death, Grief, and Hope. The liturgies in Vol 2 can help us face the most harrowing moments in our lives and remind us that our lives are shot through with sacred purpose and eternal hopes even when suffering and pain threaten to overwhelm us.
Ways You Went
After Hopkins and Wiman
I wake up in a crowded room. Dreams that worked my jaw all night press in then dissipate. Alone, I turn to see my husband is already up, the kettle proves he knows I love hot coffee when I wake. Up in a crowded room in heaven, that cloud of witnesses turns to see me rise into a new day— bra, skirt, sweater, shoes, keys, guilt that pokes and nags and wonders why I wake up. In the crowded room behind my eyes spreadsheets spread while I drive, demanding— Total the lattes this year. Add the cost of oil used against the hunger and injustice in your wake. Up in a crowded room in the city, elected men address their lists and calendars: power calls to power, maneuvering in the graceless dark that you and I wake up in. A crowded room is no place to ask Where is God? But go ahead.
Avo I
The flight paths of a thousand planes fan out above St. Joseph’s— packed with living souls going their ways, unknown to me grounded beside redbud, rhododendron. Where is this poem headed— fear? adventure? Hope? The roar of each one floods the grounds, the library, the cells of all retreatants— fills St. Mary’s chapel as the brothers bow their heads and say Amen. Five men outside, speaking Spanish, unearth a blooming, bright azalea, shovel mulch (O rich rebirth of untold deaths!) and deftly shave the boxwood along the Stations of the Cross. A bronze Christ appears stricken, comfortless, adorned by bird shit white and fresh. Bells chime for dinner— we gather, eat in silence, except my fork scrapes the forest green plate clean. I lift my head, a plane rises over us, another dares to descend.
Avo II
You touch deep places with fire in Your hands— the seven stars You hold, a constellation of jagged edges so my own grip is pointless and slippery as hell. Like grass against the wind, my fingers bend and bow unpredictably, I’m afraid. Dad says I shook like a leaf as he reached back to comfort me when our station wagon hit a leaping buck in high season. I remember curling in, yes as if cupped by a still larger hand— like the bunnies our neighbor sold that Easter. Paraded down the street in a box lid, five or six huddled tight small enough to fit in my own young palm. Without asking Mom, I picked the all- white one— as if cotton as if Elijah’s little cloud came down— as if held just so I might calm maybe warm the live, shivering Snowball.
Memama
Who wants to hear of hospice, incontinence, the rags and ruined carpets— especially when it’s your mother in that bed, whose creaks and metal railings make the farmhouse den more of an institution. The TV’s on, has been since you remember; the piano quiet for fifty years, more? Mom is gentle now, strains to a smile but asks about the good Lord’s will in all of this. Silent, your eyes lift, rest on the handwritten family tree, still crooked on the wall next to Dad’s taxidermied turkey. One room over, in the blue recliner all but blind, he grunts with (let’s say) gratitude as you hoist the one who nursed you nearly seventy years ago. You chat through the shuffle to the bathroom as if you’d always embraced like this. She needs you in the night now, so you’re sleeping in your childhood bedroom, where a blue-eyed Jesus looks down. He’s knocking at the door— you know the one.
Why this waste?
Sister, I pour out too from a broken spirit my most precious substance— Hope fluid as rain and as generously given to this dry earth, the just and the unjust. My alabaster jar shelved for generations— an heirloom from the old Source— potent, drawn from whelms deep underground where floods soak and settle as in Jacob’s well. Begotten and begetting tribes who fought over it forgot its spring is eternal— it rises of all places in the belly— cleansing organs, dreams, kinetic acts of bended knee, lifted palms, each ebenezer raised and hair undone til it flows to the floor, pools is used— this tool of grief and reverence. With my only beauty I’m wiping, wiping, weeping.
Rev. Anna A. Friedrich is a poet, artist, homemaker, and small business owner. Among the things she loves the most are color, vintage textiles, kayaking with her husband of 20 years, and snuggling her creatures (cat Virginia and dogs Fiona & Lily). Anna and her family (not just the animals, they also have two wonderful sons!) live right outside of their favorite city, Boston, but not far enough to escape its famed weather, traffic, or critical spirit.