Losing a loved one can mean you feel painful grief for a long time. Often it can help to express those feelings through writing poetry. But it can be hard for someone who has never written a poem to know how to put their feelings down on paper. Each person’s expression of their loss is different and their own. Poetry can help you cope when in mourning.
I’d like to share with you my own way of transforming the grief in my heart from the loss of my parents into words on paper, and some techniques to use that may be helpful to you.
When I began writing my poems I wasn’t consciously thinking about my process, but it helps me to identify exactly what I was doing and how I was doing it, and hopefully this will be helpful to you, as well. My words came to me, flowed through me, in a more automatic way. I never had to think about them. But what does that really mean? Writing can be intuitive and spontaneous from your subconscious, a sort of free flow of feelings, or it can be more of a fully-thought-out process where your words are planned, or from something else you learned how to do in a class, or read from a book. All methods are valid.
Subconscious writing is subjective and reflective, as opposed to objective and descriptive. A reflective poem is about your feelings, about your loss and your state of mind, your inner life. A descriptive poem about your loss will help others to see that person as you see them.
This difference ties into the purpose of your poem. Think about what you’d like to say to your loved one. Do you want to describe to others what your life was like for you with your loved one? Or share a story or a specific characteristic of the person you’ve lost? Do you want to say a last goodbye? Or recall a specific moment with them, a conversation you had with the deceased?
My poems tend to be more feeling oriented, the words put together in an internal logic reflecting how I connect my ideas. You can receive your ideas from a contemplative process where one thought leads to another, or you can receive them from a purely rational thinking process where one idea connects to another logically. When I write, I’m reflecting on the world and on death, loss, family, love, and what those experiences have meant to me internally in my life. These are my inner moods, feelings, and emotions.
But it’s just as good if you want to write about a specific characteristic of the person you’ve lost. For example, if your deceased father donated a lot of time to charities, you might share a story about him helping to build houses for Habitat for Humanity. Or if your mother was a social butterfly, you might write about all the parties she attended and enjoyed during her lifetime. These paint a portrait of your loved one that other people can see. Getting others to see your loved one as you saw them can also be satisfying. In this way, you share your view of your loved one’s personality with others. Once they can see them as you did, it diffuses the pain a little. Shared sorrow is like splitting up the hurt between people. It lessens it.
When you focus on your own feelings and internal despondency or state of mind, much transformation can take place through your words, the way you’re putting them together. The deeper you go into your subconscious, the more capacity you’ll have for your writing to change you and help you recover.
A main thing here is to express your feelings and thoughts freely. Don’t hold anything back. Whatever comes into your mind, write it down. Don’t be afraid of your emotions, write down angry or despairing thoughts. Emotions can be conflicting – love and hate, guilt and innocence. There is no judgment here, your poem is yours, and you don’t need anyone’s approval or validation. These are your feelings, you own them. They are your words and your thoughts, so you can do as you like. No one can tell you how to feel. It is also very important to connect with your own grief and be aware of your own thoughts and feelings. You can’t write about your feelings until you acknowledge you have them and know what they are.
Also, poems can be based on any of the five senses. My poems happen to be strong on imagery. But maybe your poetic strength is in sound or touch, or even taste or smell. There are many wonderful poems based on words that evoke the tactile sense of touch. Perhaps the softness of a cable-knit sweater you gave your deceased loved one for their birthday many years ago, or the texture of the autumn leaves strewn on a path that you walked many times with your loved one, or the smooth feel of a silk scarf that your grandmother used to wear.
A poem can be any length, composed of short or long rhythmically arranged sentences. Words can be arranged in many different ways and styles. There are haikus, elegies, epitaphs, narrative poems, or limericks. There are also many different forms you can follow for your poem. You can write a lyric poem which is like a song. This lends itself well to feelings and moods. There is a sonnet which has a specific number of lines and has a rhyme scheme, or you could make your poem free verse, not rhyming, or just make up your own form. No one says that your poem has to follow any traditional form.
Once you have your thoughts and feelings freely written down, you might want to read through what you’ve written, and circle certain words or phrases that stand out. They will be the basis of your poem and allow it to take shape. Then concentrate on what you’ve circled, and see if any images or physical sensations come up for you. Try to identify your strongest image or sensation as the start of your poem. Maybe one of the sentences evokes an image of the way your loved one smiled or moved, or you will hear the sound of their voice, or smell your mother’s favorite perfume in a line you wrote. Try to write down a concrete physical sensation you associate with the words.
Writing helps you to work through and integrate what you’re feeling. The grief doesn’t really ever go away, but it should lessen and eventually integrate into who you are. The loss becomes an integral part of you in such a way as to no longer dominate your life. Writing about pain and loss is hard. But honestly exploring your memories and emotions associated with your loss can help you begin to recover and heal.
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