Over time, grief and loss change shape. So much of what remains lives in gesture, language, and the things we learned without ever formally being taught them.
I know there are those of you out there who have lost the most important people in your lives, and I often find myself thinking about this great mystery. What is this life if it were not for them? To have learned, to have watched closely, to have listened, and now, without being told, to know where to place our hands.
I think I can make some guesses about life and its meaning, but I cannot make sense of death, or what life there may be after it. I believe in the mystery of it all, and can only really rely on memory, however inaccurate memory itself may sometimes be. Perhaps memory is the afterlife.
I wrote this poem about my father, and I was fortunate enough to have it included in the Montreal Poetry Prize anthology in 2020.

Davide Angelo

▶︎ Montreal Poetry Prize — Elegy for a Tiler