In this week’s poem, Stuart Kestenbaum writes an intimate, meditative hymn of grief. I love this poem’s shifting garland of images—blossoms and fruit, wind and dust—and how they serve as symbols, and sometimes solace, for all in our lives that can so suddenly pass, change, or disappear.

Stuart Kestenbaum is the author of six collections of poems and a collection of essays The View from Here (Brynmorgen Press). He served as Maine’s poet laureate from 2016-2021, and was the host of the Maine Public Radio program Poems from Here. Most recently he and visual artist Susan Webster have collaborated on A Quiet Book (Brynmorgen Press 2024), a collection of collages and improvised handwritten text.

Grief

Today my wife made a mandala
out of flower blossoms.
They were from a bouquet
that a friend had brought to our home,
flowers she had used in a ceremony
for her husband, dead three months,
where we all howled at the full moon.
What else could you do?
We go on living: the flowers bloom,
the petals fall, the fruit sets.
The fruit on the bough is the blossom,
the blossom is the sap and the light,
swaying in the breeze.
Some nights, the wind shakes our house,
not so much that it will fall down
after 150 years of standing,
but enough that you can say
that the house is trembling.
On the news tonight a crying man
said that from his apartment
he could see his parents’ condo
in another building when
it all collapsed before his eyes.
There was no wind, just the dust
that had been a home
rising in the air.

– Stuart Kestenbaum

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. DEEP WATER: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Grief,” copyright 2025 by Stuart Kestenbaum, appears by permission of the author.