Poetry: “ambiguous grief” by Grace Manning

Grace Manning’s “ambiguous grief” swirls with a kind of push-and-pull that feels all too familiar in our current world of identity politics, where it’s too easy to say the wrong thing, or make the wrong post. It’s hard to know what to say, what’s right and what’s wrong, what we’re allowed to feel and what we’re not. But Manning comes to a human connection at the end, the laughter of children playing becoming a symbol for the way that sometimes, complicated ideas are really very simple, and grief is about people, not politics.

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1. ambiguous grief
i don’t understand why
you are not allowed to be
in love with your country

even when it is alien
now
even when it has been taken
from you

this taking of homes it is
a particular kind of cruelty
and you are not even allowed
to grieve it

sometimes
you say
it is comforting
that you are all
the same lonely

you can talk about
your families
with the same ache
this other kind of
missing them

i can remember
watching cartoons on saturdays
when i was surrounded
by clusters of mountains
emptied into fields
and driving rain and musty
smell of animal

and you were in dusty marketplaces
eating bloody pomegranates
wishing for snow
and learning english so one day
you could leave

you say
it is lucky
that ending your own life
is haram
or everyone in Afghanistan
would have done it
already

 you marvel at my apathy
towards religion
when it has been
your only reason

when without it
you would have nothing else
and i am not sure
i believe in god
anymore

but i do for you

because if there is
a god
then i know he is here
in the midst of all of this
lonely and missing
and anger and despair

in the midst of all of this
loving and listening and
this unbelievable
abundant joy

if there is a god
he could not look away
from afghan girls in this classroom
on this street

running
in this courtyard

laughing.