pathway to peace

joy and grief often reside in neighboring rooms
both laughs and gut-wrenching in these laboring rooms

sometimes you’d swear these paper chambers all adjoined
shredded walls opening leaks to now pouring rooms

mad passions mix ’til you don’t know upstairs from down
the housemates now working as one restoring rooms

their incompatibility at first is stark
as two or more join the task of exploring rooms

so, for Steve, feel all feels and touch all the touches
joy and grief often reside in neighboring rooms

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I lost a friend to suicide last weekend, and I’ve been wanting to write about it but didn’t know how (I may still blog). Anyway, I decided to try a new form, the ghazal, and see if the rules helped organize my thoughts and feelings. I don’t know if it did, but this is for those of us who are trying to deal with the loss of Steve, laughing next to the pain.

I love and miss you, Steve, and I love and appreciate all of you who are walking through this loss with me.

Friends mourn Steve Austin, former pastor and author who wrote about suicide and mental health

A Ghazal is a poem that is made up like an odd numbered chain of couplets, where each couplet is an independent poem. It should be natural to put a comma at the end of the first line. The Ghazal has a refrain of one to three words that repeat, and an inline rhyme that preceedes the refrain. Lines 1 and 2, then every second line, has this refrain and inline rhyme, and the last couplet should refer to the authors pen-name… The rhyming scheme is AA bA cA dA eA etc.