This is what the meaning of heartbreak is #Poem by Abigail George

 

One day
I'll be gone

I've made peace with the fact
that you won't miss me

Dearest Mother,
I know you won't

I've made peace with that
You never wanted me

You've told me
that I would be buried

in a pine box
And that I would have a pauper's funeral

You want him, don't you?

Cackling
Then witchy laughter, yours

But then the typewriter appeared
What was that?

No, I don't think that you
will miss me when I'm gone

You won't miss
anything about me

My clairvoyance, for one
the prettiness

of how I use the word “sublimate” in a poem,
my third eye,

for another
yes, my psychic ability

that left strangers
spellbound

will leave them
spellbound no more

You never wanted
the likes of me for a daughter

Smartie eating
Bertha Mason

In the way
that people

miss rain
sometimes

I will miss you, Earth
You held me

when
my own mother's

arms wouldn't
(refused to)

You, Earth, spoke to me
but not the weight

of sadness
How quiet

disappointment is,
my life,

and the sea
of this silence

in the male
psychiatric nurse

who hovers
in the ascendance

of the stillness
of the night

I will grow
sunflowers for you

even though
you will call it

sadness
I will write

letters to you
from heaven
and hide the paintings

of poems in them
like I was Matthew Wong

I will write them to you
by the light
of the stars

It was the light
perhaps the hand of God
that visited me

in the mental hospital
shining mightily

through each
crack in the wall

So beautiful
that even the bars

at the windows
wept with joy,

and the grass
that I walked on rejoiced

Yes, time
did not exist

in the mental hospital
Just these restless spaces,

and the inadequacy of the patients
in the ward

like candles
Horses, trying to navigate

the stillness
the sea

Even when
I leave this world

I will never
leave you, your side
I want you to know

that even in my sadness
I will always
choose you

even though you
won't choose me

I will always choose the stillness,
the sea

found in the wards
of Garden City Clinic
Helen Joseph, Tara

Sunnyside, Hunterscraig
Provincial Hospital
the psychiatric nurses

good shepherds
dressed in white like ships

each one
the reincarnation of the RMS Carpathia

how they mothered me, kept watch, these lanterns
night and day

like the praise & worship
of Earth

mothered me, once
the clouds
in the ceiling

the non-existent
mirrors in the bathroom

The tide of my father
flows into me

I understand the meaning
of grief now,

the songs
of these tears

There is divinity
in all of life

These are not just songs
Listen!

They're hymns, psalms
Scriptural mandates

not just madness
or the attic space of Mrs Rochester

They’re prayers
Yes, God is in all of life

You, mother
In my hands

are a prayer
In God's hands
you were the chosen one

You were chosen to be my mother,
to raise me

Even years
of not being loved
can feel sacred

Even forgiveness,
even a typewriter
can be victorious conquerors.