I Grieve For Them

Grief rips through the fabric of my being

Paralyzing me.

Who is it that I mourn so deeply?

The classmate whose features I strain to remember

The friend I was to have coffee with but never will

It cannot be them, can it? 

Where there was no love, can there be a loss?

Grief wraps itself like a shawl around me

Smothering me.

I weep for people I never knew

The father whose daughter couldn’t see his body

The son was cremated by strangers in a faraway land

People I met only after their death

Am I permitted to weep for them?

Grief is the whirlpool that drags me in

Drowning me.

I grieve for every shroud abandoned.

Saffron wraps half-buried on the sandy river bed

Flames dancing around pyres in the parking lot.

They are not numbers. They had dreams. They are loved.

I have no right, but I grieve for them. For me