December 2021
Robert Manchester
r1manchester@hotmail.com
Bio Note: An aging native of New Hampshire who has spent many years writing poetry, gardening and practicing curmudgeonly behavior to newcomers. Member of the John Hay Poetry Society and the poetry Society of New Hampshire.

Letter To A Poet Friend

Dear E.... (admittedly feeling a little sorry for myself today)....

      I find it is so hard to express a profound sense of loss, either through death, love lost, child lost, etc. that lasts for a long time without sounding melodramatic and/or boring. And hearing ("get over it", "plenty of fish in the sea", "time heals all, etc")

      I thought of you because you put it so eloquently in the loon's unanswered call and I don't think anyone in that room the night you read it understood, perhaps because no one has lost someone who will just not go away....or perhaps they just didn't get it.

      I struggle to put on paper that feeling of emptiness without sounding maudlin...the sense that yes, you can hear the birds, traffic, music in the distance, but there is this void you are enveloped in that has no sound, no end. I can remember being on a ship way out to sea and looking to the horizon and seeing not a thing but a sea of loneliness.

      Wouldn't it be nice to be able to have certain memories erased. I think the older we get the more we become receptacles of what we have lost, i. e., we are only what we have not already lost.

      The loon does not go away, it has been committed to paper. No one needs to go back and read it if they don't want to hear about it anymore, or just figure it will find a new mate, but forever it faces that heart break, that quiet, that awful, awful feeling of loss.
©2021 Robert Manchester
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