THE EARTH WILL GRIEVE YOU

By M.B.

three things that will happen

after you kill yourself

1. people will notice you’re gone

silence will fill the spaces

where your laughter echoed

2. the world will spin on

streets will fill

cafes will open

the seasons will change

without asking you to see them

life continues without pause

3. years will pass

photographs yellow while

you become a memory

the space you once held

will quietly be taken up again

the world will keep spinning

and maybe that’s why you want to leave

you know your absence would be like a wave

powerful

destructive at first

but all waves become ripples

small echoes in the tide

there would come a day when

the last pieces of you would

crash against the shore

and be pulled back into the sea

becoming one with time

but what you don’t know is

the Earth will grieve you

the morning dew will rest patiently

on the leaves of hydrangeas

waiting for you to see her

the wind that danced through your hair

to carry your scent in its breeze

will flutter through wildflowers

and miss the comfort of vanilla and honey

the monarch butterflies

that used to kiss your skin

will rest on sunflowers and ponder

why sunshine feels so cold

the sun whose rays turned

your brown eyes into pools of honey

will touch oceans and yearn

to be seen by eyes that held it back

the Earth will not collapse in on itself

but the dirt that holds your decaying body

will turn the worms away

it will offer itself in return for your breath

but the worms of course do it anyway

they will fill the hollow space

inside of your ribcage

and make a home inside of your bones

eating away at the fragments of you

but what you don’t know is

time will also grieve you

it will remember your birth

how you came into the world

with your fists clutching the air

as if life would escape you

if you let go of her

it will remember

your first steps

feet stumbling against

the living room floor

arms out wide

ready to catch yourself if you fall

it will remember

the ache of growing pains

how even love stretched you taller

it will remember

your first kiss

lips pressing together

how it made the air feel lighter

it will remember

the night you traced constellations

on a lover’s skin

your laughter soft enough

to keep the neighbors dreaming

time will remember

and it will grieve

it will mourn for

all of the wrinkles

you never earned

crows feet and smile lines mapping

everywhere your joy traveled

of years you were meant to wander

time will not collapse in on itself

but it will lament the hours

it will wonder if

it should have held you longer

if its hands should have

been gentler with your days

it spills forward

letting your body become a corpse

erasing you from the world slowly

and then all at once

the world will keep spinning

but there is so much love

so much life

you have yet to experience

sunlight threading through the

branches of a willow tree

quiet mornings where rain

makes the world come to a slow

the way the right song can

curl around your chest

and make you breathe again

how your coffee order can make you feel

like morning has arrived inside of you

there are so many

beautiful reasons to live

to feel

to fail

to love

to ache

to move through the world

with a body that remembers

both sorrow and delight

and know

in the simplest way

you are here



ABOUT THE POEM: "I wrote this poem during mental health month last year after reflecting about a really dark time I went though when I was about thirteen. I am in my twenties now. I remember feeling despair, above all- almost like impending doom- because I was certain that things would not get better (much to my disbelief, they did)! I wrote this poem for people out there who are questioning why they should keep going; to tell them to simply live for the privilege of living. Life is so beautiful, and it would be a shame for it to pass you by."

Facebook @ Letters from the archivE

PANDORA’S PURPOSE

By Isabelle P. Byrne

Oh mortal mother, first of your kind,

As you took to the world hoping to find

A way to help the ones that suffered the same ills you survived.

The Corinthian columns began to crack,

The sorrowful souls seeped out in inky black.

No rest for all, or those that had contracted these ills,

A plague of disease so potent it kills.

No need to look closer, as their innards begin to show,

Too much sickness to let the goodness grow.

Holding tight limp limbs that are so desperate to go,

Back-breaking weight of all the bad things she had grown to know.

All unwoven before her, her tears began to show.

After bad fate, she felt she had nowhere to fit,

First day of school with nowhere to sit.

Years trapped inside the consequences of her actions,

One day she turned her fight,

Eyes looking forward, away from the dark and toward the light.

She saw those who had lost their sight.

With her broken bones calcified and her scars on the fade,

She took the luck she had left and took it to trade.

Pandora’s purpose came with one thing that settled her mind:

That Hope was left in the box as she shut it just in time.

So she made it her goal to show the others the way,

Through the labyrinth, far away from the devil’s doorway.

That knowing becomes a duty to fulfil.

Guilty through omission is so deeply instilled.

Reeling those up who fell between the exception and the rule,

Wrapping the gold-threaded life back onto the spool.

We may not ever stop the pain that could have been avoided.

Never deterred, she continued to thread the needle and stitch the holes of the others till embroidered.

So desperate to stop her fall, she grasped for the nettles,

As every cherry blossom was told that glory came from fallen petals.

If you really want to live, you must endure the pain of survival.

As God leans in close with Pandora’s head pressed against rifle,

Her brass heart weathered patina green,

Tear-like tram tracks, one for each tragedy she had seen.

A slipstream that channels droplets till they linger,

Gathering momentum as streams turn to rivers until bound as one.

Riding in the wake of trauma, trying to make a dam to stop it from being passed on.

That from ruin comes purpose,

Reason and meaning.

That our sorrow makes us want to heal the bleeding.

Too many lives riding on her rusted hinges,

As she packed her box and travelled over burnt bridges,

Trying to rebox all that she had unboxed

By mending all the sick souls she came across.

She took tattered twine and tethered all she had unleashed.

She came and scrubbed bloodied walls clean with bleach.

She brought hope behind tired seams,

Every inch frayed so slightly as she prayed on hard-skin knees,

As she believed she was the one that held the jailer’s keys.

So rehearsed in tragedy, she lost sight of harmony,

Until she found purpose in the stars and ancient astronomy.

The stars do not bind us but incline us to be,

A vision not many have been blessed to see.

You must go through the darkness to find the devil and beg to be free.

She held the hand of the lost and took them to be saved,

As she was the hope that helped the others be brave.

This life is so cruel and unfair,

Because sometimes helping ourselves isn’t as easy as diverting our care elsewhere.

It’s teaching yourself how to love yourself without using another’s perspective attached.

We try to rewrite the past by changing the concept of fact,

And we save the ones we see ourselves in the most,

Ensuring to catch a bullet while strapped to our own whipping post.

You watch them walk into hell and help them all the way through,

Even if there was no one there for you.

It should be a sin not to act upon our experience of privilege.

Her journey became that of duty, as if it were her very own pilgrimage.

Her only determinist philosophy was the certainty of chance.

She taught the others the choreography of life in the hope they’ll avoid the devil’s dance.

We may never have been able to do it for ourselves.

We may not know the true story our mind tells.

But Pandora’s purpose, so virtuous in being,

Made it clear what she thought was seeing:

A world of lost people whose hearts need feeding.

She made it her job to reassure those who had lost meaning.

Thus spoke Rumi:

“Where there is ruin, there’s hope for treasure.”

And in the end, Pandora’s ruin and purpose balanced into equal measure.”

ABOUT ISABELLE: Isabelle is a published poet whose work delves into themes of identity, mental health, sociological thought, and nihilism. Her debut pamphlet, Pandora’s Ruin, was selected for the British Library’s prestigious collection in 2022, and is archived at both Oxford and Cambridge Universities. The book is a mythological exploration of mental illness, hospitalisation, electroconvulsive therapy and the process of rebuilding a “ruined” identity in recovery.

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