Upon learning my daughter’s friend’s adoptive mother died

This last week I have been studying the craft of the word, of the line, of poetry at Pacific University and their low-residency MFA.

As I enter the third semester where we write an essay I have become intrigued by what poetry really is, and can it ever be workshopped. Is the act of writing a poem simply a cathartic moment of release, and each subsequent version is a dilution of that moment? Perhaps.

As I returned from Forest Grove, Oregon, my daughter come into our bedroom and informed me of devastating news.

I instantly wrote this poem, and minor edits did follow. The revelation for me in this sadness, as I explained to my wife, is that poetry, for me, is how I process the world - and maybe that’s what poetry is after all.

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Upon learning my daughter’s friend’s adoptive mother died

I studied the Douglas Fir in our garden and contemplated when does a tree know it’s fully grown?
As it arcs into the sky, is it conscious of memory?
Is a river no longer a river when it becomes the sea? Haven’s mum died today.
I wonder about her in Oregon, whether she looks differently at the same trees,
and if life will simply carry on as it stretches toward the clouds.
One death, when the body leaves the world, the other —
a vast ocean rocking back and forth against an empty shoreline.