Certain moments are burned into your brain and heart, moments that even as they happened you knew would haunt you forever, like the way your little boy nodded and kept nodding, that one afternoon on the couch. Looking back now, through the tunnel of time, there are passages so rough that you narrowed time down to half-hour segments in order to make it through. Had to trust that somehow the invisible ship would carry you from one invisible shore and deposit you on another. That you would find yourself again.
You do find yourself again, over and over, but you’re not the same person you were before. Each time, there has been a long season of necessary silence, and even if you look the same, you aren’t. Maybe we don’t heal so much as shift, and yield, and absorb in a way that lets us keep living with all the everythings that happen in a life.
Aftermath Sonnet, by Gregory Orr
Letting my tongue sleep,
and my heart go numb.
Sensing that speech
too soon,
after such a wound,
would only be
a different bleeding.
Even needing to leave
the page blank.
Long season
of silence—
trusting that under
its bandage of snow,
the field of me is healing.
For more information about Gregory Orr, please click here.
For more information about Gregory Orr, please https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/gregory-orr.
Alison McGhee 
This made me cry. Four years of not being able to, as I have to be strong……. Thank you.
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Kate, much love and solidarity to you. xoxo
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