The Alchemy of Grief

Some of the tears he whittles into fine points. Those are good for gouging out his eyes. Others he distills. At night, blind and drunk, he pretends he can’t feel a thing.

 

new moon
the black hole
of the cauldron

Published by

Bob Lucky

Bob Lucky lives in Portugal. His work has appeared and is forthcoming in various journals including Modern Haiku, tinywords, Rattle, MacQueen?s Quarterly, Presence, The Haibun Journal, and others. He's the author of Ethiopian Time (Red Bird Chapbooks), Conversation Starters in a Language No One Speaks (SurVision Books), My Theology (Cyberwit) and What I Say to You (proletariat.org).

11 thoughts on “”

  1. That's one of those exceptional fusions of idea and image that take your breath away. I will go on from here pretending that I thought it up! "At night, blind and drunk," indeed. Fabulous!
    Charles D. Tarlton

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  3. Wow! This one is a painfully powerful twist. ?Some of the tears he whittles into fine points.? Amazing imagery.

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  6. What draws me in most in this very powerful piece is the way the masculine is juxtaposed with the feminine. We first see emotion categorized by material production, violent physical action, war on oneself, an attempt to deny emotion–all things which tend to be associated with the masculine or animus. Then in the haiku, the feminine or anima begins to emerge, first in the form of a new moon, then the womblike void, then the all-powerful symbol of the cauldron itself. These seem to be separate at first glance. But then images begin to connect with one another–the chiseled slivers of tears with the sliver of moon, the blindness with the black, the distillation with the cauldron–until one feels a wholeness beginning to emerge from the brokenness. I love the way the title, which harkens to these soul processes we all must go through, both ties prose and haiku together and expands the piece beyond the sum of those parts.

    Beautifully painful, Bob.

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