Blog

12th April, 2024

Friday Poem – ‘Grief’s Alphabet’ by Carrie Etter

Black and white photo of a pile of scrabble tiles

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Grief’s Alphabet’ by Carrie Etter, the title poem from her new collection Grief’s Alphabet.

Grief ’s Alphabet
A is for a teacher’s typical Red Delicious, her lifelong, unattained
ambition, while
B is she herself, Bernadine, the only one I’ve known.
C could be Carrie, if she hadn’t, on adoption day, named me Carol.
D, daughter, is forever, which entails
Etter, also the name of a Swiss cherry liqueur I long to taste.
F could name the doctors’ folly,
giving her diagnosis as norovirus and looking no further until
hospital, just weeks before my expected visit. Yes, it’s all about me,
insolent, indolent ingrate of a daughter,
joylessly
keening eleven years
later.
Modie, mommy, mother, maman,
norovirus it wasn’t, and your colonoscopy was
over before begun. I was in Devon,
oblivious, again. It was supposed to be a routine
procedure, and yet. And yet, back from dinner, I
quickened, called, just to check in, and in seconds
recoiled,
shuddered, screamed, and wept.
T is tally, my tally of regrets. What can I say to
you in death? Is there any
virtue in
wielding this clumsy dirge on an old Fisher Price
xylophone? Modie, I’m getting old without
you, and yet somehow I’m an exuberant
zaftig at an improbable zenith, only–only–because of you.

Carrie will be launching Grief’s Alphabet at Toppings Bookshop in Bath on Thursday 18th April from 7pm. Visit their website for more details.