A fresh bank of cumulus clouds floats across the sky. The bare maple branches atop the trees in the front yard gently sway in the light breeze. The near-midafternoon sun casts their pale shadows across neighbors’ houses like so much shadow theater.
Except for the cold, it’s a day to visit their grave.
Spring with its showers passed. Summer with its searing heat passed. Autumn with its falling foliage passed. Now, this winter, with its defecit of snow, passes. Their memorial stone stoically endures the shifting climate and constant absence.
Seated in the room that once was my mother’s bedroom, now an office devoid of her last traces, I feel no urgency to drive to Mary Rest. And with every ride on the tractor mower, or every push of the snow thrower, I need no stone reminders of my father.
“Blessed are they who mourn, for they will be comforted.”
But when does grief yield to mourning? Whenever we pass through our grief to the full by letting ourselves mourn.
I await the moment when I will do so.
pale grass
frozen earth awaiting
an early thaw
I turn my still-dry eyes
to a set of essays
for Sue Vincent’s Thursday photo prompt: Choiceย #writephoto
and the Tank Poets on Site Facebook Group: Gerry Muse #193: a Time to Mourn
Frank J. Tassone 
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