To be loving is to be open to grief, to be touched by sorrow, even sorrow that is unending …
(bell hooks)

I’ve dwelt at length in my previous post on the loss of my partner Laura five and a half months ago and the experience of mourning her in those early weeks after her passing. It’s still early days, to be sure, and the hole in my heart remains acutely tender. Even so, where at first there was only an aching void, the emptiness is starting to give way to grateful memory and moments of unaffected appreciation for what we had shared together for over 43 years. As my chest fills with a palpable warmth on such occasions, I come to realize that though our relationship has been radically transformed, my bestie is still alive and present within me, in the love that had grown between us and still remains.

That said, but for such epiphanies of grace and comfort, I’m not sure I could endure the bouts of intense heartache that continue to make themselves felt with astonishing regularity. The tears flow freely – sometimes for myself, but even more for Laura and for the frustrated liveliness that her frail body could no longer sustain. And now that the natural world is starting to turn in on itself with the shorter days and longer nights, the pangs of desolation seem to hit home that much harder despite the passage of time. By late August the seasonal changes were already noticeable when I wrote the following lines:

SPARROWS – for Laura G

It was in the heart of spring
When your own gave out
                                      and mine
Fell open beneath my throat 

Letting go a thousand sparrows
To join my sorrow to the sky 

Now the nights are growing longer
Leaning into fall
                         and moments when
                         in the dark
I think I might awaken from this dream

To slip Inside your room next door
To tell you all about it
                                  if only
                                  I could

t seems almost a sin to be so focused on one’s personal grief when the world at large is in such crisis as to threaten world war abroad and harsh authoritarian governance here at home. But the truth is, I find myself crying over these things, too, hardly able to help myself. If anything, the flood of feeling occasioned by my partner’s passing has put a crack in my heart’s accustomed defenses. Whether faraway in places like Gaza or Ukraine, or up close on our American streets, the atrocities keep piling up day after day to the point where the violence and rank injustice have become nearly normalized in public discourse, if not the public’s mind. For anyone whose heart has become as raw and exposed as a hermit crab caught out of its shell, the outrage and sorrow of it is nothing if not soul-crushing.   

What ultimately counts when encountering such collective extremity, of course, is not just how one feels, but what one does about it. It’s up to everyone with a conscience to act as best they can where they can in the ways that they can. That’s no less true for poets and writers as well, particularly when it comes to the exercise of their craft. As Albert Camus declared on receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, [T]he writer’s role is not free from difficult duties. By definition he cannot put himself today in the service of those who make history; he is at the service of those who suffer it …1

This is where I have a problem. I don’t know whether to count it as a character failing or as a simple lack of talent, but I have a difficult time taking on explicitly social or political themes in my poetry. Not that I don’t make an earnest effort from time to time, looking to give voice to the strong feelings I have about various issues, but the results have rarely been satisfying from either an artistic or expressive standpoint. I usually end up setting these attempts aside, thinking that I might be able to repurpose some of the juicier lines later on down the road.

There have been the odd exceptions, though, such as this poem I wrote in response to Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021. It doesn’t make explicit reference to the event except for the date and play of words in the title, but manages to convey an almost physical sense of release in the wake of Donald Trump’s failed coup attempt and the promise of a more enlightened leadership taking over in the Oval Office:

INAUGURY – January 20, 2021

It was no ordinary day
                                  the winter sky
Seeming a little wider
                                 and not so ashen
                                 or sedimentary

As to weigh down hard against the eye 

Or put a ceiling on these wingbeats
Buried deep inside my chest 

Beneath the layers of a muscled caution
Making it labor just to breathe 

Much less sing
                      like a bird
                      perched
With unwavering abandon 

On the rise and swell of its natal cry

By contrast, when Trump won reelection last November, it was all I could do to offer up an emotional weather report:

NOVEMBER 2024

Fall’s first snow
                        unseasonably wet
Lying thick on the ground

And weighing on the tree branches
Still half in leaf

                        pressing down 
Like the leaden skies overhead
And a mind full of gray clouds
                                              no horizon
                                              in sight

It’s possible, of course, that not all poetry has to engage explicit political or social content to bear effective witness to the historical moment. It may be enough for a poem to angle beneath the topical surface to raise the reader’s consciousness from underneath, as it were, leveraging the action of archetypal energies inhabiting the basement of the psyche. In a letter he wrote to Wendall Berry back in 1977, Gary Snyder makes exactly this point: As poets, our politics mostly stand back from that flow of topical events; and the place we do our real work is in the unconscious, or myth-consciousness of the culture; a place where people decide (without knowing it) to change their values …2  As a poet temperamentally drawn toward an aesthetic of Rilkean introspection, I find these words particularly reassuring.

I’ll finish here with a piece that I wrote shortly after Trump’s first inauguration in 2017 in response to his shocking rise to power. Without referring explicitly to either the man or the event, the poem seeks to register a particular feeling tone using tropes and imagery that “Inaugury” would echo four years later to contrasting effect:

AUSPICE

Freedom is a strange thing. Once you've experienced it, 
it remains in your heart and no one can take it away …
(Ai Weiwei)

Not hope 
              we're past that now 
But cupped close to the heart 
A quavering warmth 
Nestled egg-like in a gesture
Of folded wings
                        and chapped fingers

Bitten with cold
                        this memory
                        of traceless flight 
Across an unbounded
Blue horizon

                   and soft 
Like a brush
                   of outspread feathers 
A fugitive stroke of shadow
Traversing the open snow

Beyond hope
                    yet so much closer
Hollowed out inside our bones
What is most ourselves
                                   grown birdlike 
And resolute in our natal freedom

Rising on the wellspring
Of the world's 
                     first imagining 
The angel that we are
Robed in earth and holy yearning

A prayer we've not forgotten
But woven throughout this flesh 
And breath
                 these bodies 
                 a beating heart 
Bent to power
                     beyond dying
The groundswell beneath our feet

My irrepressible bestie hated bullies and wasn’t ever afraid to stand up to them, not even as her health was growing visibly frail. Even so, when I contemplate the harsh reactionary turn that politics have taken here at home, I can’t help but take a kind of backhanded solace in the fact that she’s not around to suffer the shitshow that our country is fast becoming. For my own part, there’s nothing to do but lend my diffident shoulder to the wheel like any other writer or artist seeking in the creative imagination a worthy means to defend against the ruination of the world.

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1) Camus, Albert. “Banquet speech.” NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach 2025. Accessed 4 Oct 2025. <www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1957/camus/speech/>

2) As quoted in A Sense of the Whole: Reading Gary Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers Without End. Mark Gonnerman, ed. Counterpoint 2015, pg 135.

Copyright © 2025 Nicole A Spencer. All rights reserved.