grief words / brief words
Elegy
Who would I show it to
—W.S. Merwin
*
Does grief exceed words, or is it the other way around?
—John Yau, in a review of Muriel Leung’s Bone Confetti
*
Give sorrow words; the grief that
does not speak
wispers the o’er-fraught heart,
and bids it break.
—William Shakespeare, Macbeth; epigraph to section 1 of Victoria Chang’s new book Obit
*
Those gifts you left
have become my enemies:
without them
there might have been
a moment’s forgetting.
—Ono no Komachi, trans. Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani