Dear Ali, Reading your zine felt like being spoken to by grief itself. The weight of your lines, the tenderness of your laments, I know them. You carry your mother in every syllable, in every stanza and space. It is the same way I carry mine in the lines, spaces and stanzas of every day. She left in October last year, but absence has a way of staying present.
Nostalgia when grieving is both sweet and savory, and yet, it left me aching for things that will never be. You captured this in “Butter” and “Ginataan”, Ali. But I am amazed at myself. How I endured reading your poems because, like you, I do find the weather in Manila strange, not only because of climate change, but in part because of the question you asked in your poem: Will the sky ever be clear again from one horizon to another?
I ask the same question, having lost not just my mother but my mother in law and dear good friends in the children’s book industry one after another. The weather is not only strange. It has totally changed. But you know what, it will clear up. And it will darken again. And it clears and darkens once more. Like waves swaying. This is grief. And in my case, I just stand there by the shore, breathing with waves as the wind tugs them back and pushes them forward.
Your poems have now become my companions as I hear what Rumi once offered:
“I saw grief drinking a cup of sorrow and called out, ‘It tastes sweet, does it not?’ ‘You’ve caught me,’ grief answered, ‘and you’ve ruined my business. How can I sell sorrow, when you know it’s a blessing?’”
It unsettles me, how grief can taste sweet. How sorrow can hold blessing. And yet, this is what your writing teaches me too. That grief is not only loss, but also a strange companionship. A mirror. A bridge.
I return to a poem I wrote on September 3, 2021. Then, it was simply memory. Today, it reads back to me as inheritance. What our mothers and grandmothers passed on, quietly, in kitchens and songs. I offer it to you as a companion piece, one candle beside another. One writer walking alongside each other.
Nanay Leony
©️zarahgeeh 9.3.21
Garlic, ginger
Salt and pepper
Onions, of course
What Nanay Leony calls
A concoction to ward off
Dis-ease
She sings
An ancient tune
Sounding out the words under her breath
While stirring the pot
Of chicken broth
The aroma fills the kitchen
It floats over the sala
Out to the veranda
Where I sit watching the neighborhood kids play in the rain
The smell, the sounds
They find their way into my heart
She calls for me
And I know it is time
To be healed
To be loved
And to live again for one more rainy day
While eating the flavors of earth and air
Grief, your poems remind me, is never just sorrow. It is also this: memory steeped in broth, song folded into silence, healing carried forward in small ways. I walk with you in this, Ali, trusting that somewhere between sorrow and sweetness, we’ll find what remains.
With love and kinship, in the spirit of Women Writing,
Zarah 💜🙏💜
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