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