THE WONDER OF APRIL

 

Did you know that April is national poetry month?  It's a good choice. 

Chaucer (c 1340-1400) begins The Canterbury Tales in April.  "Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote / The droght of March hath perced to the roote . . . " Many of us read those lines in high school.  I taught my seniors how to pronounce the Middle English vowels.  "When April with his showers sweet with fruit / The drought of March has pierced unto the root / And bathed each vein with liquor that has power / To generate therein and sire the flower . . . ,"  is when Christians make a pilgrimage to Canterbury, where Saint Thomas Beckett (1119-1170) was martyred for his faith.  That's Chaucer's story.

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), on the other hand, subverts Chaucer.  He writes in The Wasteland, "April is the cruelest month, breeding / lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / memory and desire, stirring / dull roots with spring rain."  Chaucer sees only the beauty of April. Writing after World War I, Eliot reveals the cruelty of the hope for springtime renewal in a world shattered by war.  

We can identify with that.  We see Gaza in rubble and Ukraine under siege.  And more. Daily, drones and bombs destroy all that lives.  Home is under strife as well.  There are places the spring rain won't touch.  Winter is not so cruel, Eliot writes.  "Winter kept us warm, covering / Earth in forgetful snow. . . " Snow obscures detritus.  It is easier to forget than to remember sometimes.  Easier to ignore than to notice.  

And yet, this April we have our own back yards, roadsides and parks fragrant with lavender wisteria and wildflowers blooming from the very cracks in the brick.  Or maybe you live where the prickly pear flower.  Or you may be feeling like Count Basie's 1956 jazz version of "April in Paris" with chestnuts in blossom.  

Ada Limón (b.1976) is our nation's poet laureate.  For poetry month she has tackled an ambitious project, reading poetry in National Parks.  Here are lines from one of her prose poems: 

The way I remember the name forsythia is that when my stepmother, Cynthia, was dying, that last week, she said lucidly, but mysteriously, MORE YELLOW.  And I thought yes, more yellow and nodded because I agreed.  Of course, more yellow.  And so now in my head, when I see that yellow tangle, I say 'For Cynthia, for Cynthia, forsythia, forsythia, more yellow.'  It is night now.  And the owl never comes, only more of night and what repeats in the night.  ©2022, Ada Limón

Such a conversational poem.  "More yellow," sounds like just the thing to say when dying.  "Of course, more yellow," the poet repeats.  Living or dying, who wouldn't want more yellow?  As my mother rested in a dark room, she suddenly said with great feeling, "All the lights are on."  "Where are you mom?" I wondered aloud.  "In heaven," she replied, not missing a beat.  The perfect setting for the sweeping branches of sunny spring forsythia.  "Light! More light!" was the last entreaty of the poet Goethe (1749-1832) as he lay on his deathbed.  Yes, yes, more yellow.  

We could study poetry all April.  Then May, then June. Matching our breathing to the rhythm of the lines.  Making connections.  Being enthralled at no cost at all but for time.  Covering ourselves with words that, like a blanket of snow, blot out the ugliness of aggression and starvation. killing and over-killing, narcissism and vulgarity, felony counts and delays.  

The wonder of April.  The wonder of poetry.  The wonder of color and light and renewal and the Resurrection of the body which happened just a few Sundays ago.  The wonder of words and the Word made flesh.  The wonder of night and what repeats in the night.  Oh, the wonder . . . 

With love, Nina Naomi

SEASON OF MISTS, LAMENTATION AND HOPE

There's something about the change of seasons that is hopeful.  The heat of late summer has lifted.  Doors and windows stay open waiting for the evening chill.  No matter what is happening--and there's enough happening today for lamentations to pierce the Heavens--Autumn still comes.  For this we must be grateful. Our human sinfulness has not, so far please God, prevented summer, fall, winter or spring.  The world keeps revolving.  And here we are, in another October.

So easily this season gives rise to poetry.  In 1902, in "Autumn Day," Rainer Marie Rilke wrote, "Lord: it is time.  The summer was immense. / Lay your shadows upon the Sundial, / and in the meadows let the wind go free."  This speaks to me.  I have a sundial in my side yard that marks a death.  I have a meadow where the wind goes free. Then the last stanza, "Whoever has no house now will not build one anymore. / Whoever is alone now will remain so for a long time."   A melancholy premonition that we must ready for what comes next, we and the birds and chipmunks and all who fly south, burrow or grow winter coats for warmth. 

The last lines tell a truth about war too. Here is where our lamentations lie. Palestinian citizens are being slaughtered in return for the slaughter of Israelis by Hamas. Children for children.  An eye for an eye.  Ukrainians are still suffering to defend their homeland and young Russians are being sent to kill or be killed. As fall turns to winter, "whoever has no house now will not build one anymore." 

Even earlier, in 1820 John Keats called autumn, "Season of Mists and Mellow Fruitfulness," using sensuous imagery to describe its fleeting abundance. And isn't abundance always fleeting?  Robert Frost wrote, "Nothing gold can stay."  How briefly are the dogwoods red and the maples yellow?  Their radiance falls to the ground and turns to mulch.

How is any of this hopeful, we might wonder, if we have not changed since Robert Burns wrote in 1784 that "Man's inhumanity to man / makes countless thousands mourn."  How can hope live amongst historical rivalries and political chaos? Why do we find it in the turning of the earth?  

maybe each new season reminds us that the earth abides. Maybe we relish that something is predictable.  Something there is from which no one need run. 

I fear the sentimentality of this thought, I who am not being slaughtered or evacuated.  But surely moments of hope are good things.  Surely, we need not be ashamed to appreciate fat mounded mums in russet and yellow or smiling pansy faces in purple and white. The colors of fall are exuberant for a reason.  This October they might make one hope that death and destruction will not have the final say. 

They might remind us that while we cannot be complacent or resigned, nor should we be without hope.

For as it is written, "Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever.  The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises.  The wind blows to the south and turns to the north; round and round it goes, ever returning on its course.  All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full."  Ecclesiastes 1:4

                                                    Nina Naomi

 

DEEP THOUGHTS FROM HARD LIVES

Sometimes the deepest thoughts come from those with the hardest lives.  Maybe always.  And what those with difficult lives touch in us are our vulnerable places;  places where, like it or not, through trial by fire our weaknesses become strengths. 

Look again at the poem I posted on December 21, 2021.  It's worth re-reading.  [I've spaced it differently here.]

 ONE ART

by Elizabeth Bishop (Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1956)

The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day.  Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.  The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:  places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel.  None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch.  And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went.  The art of losing isn't hard to master. 

I lost two cities, lovely ones.  And vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.  I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster. 

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan't have lied.  It's evident the art of losing's not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.  

Elizabeth Bishop lost her father when she was an infant, her mother to mental illness just five years later and, as an adult, her lover to suicide.  Knowing this about her, we have no trouble believing that she's acquainted with the art of losing.  But mastered it?  As we read through the poem we begin to feel that she protests too much. 

Not that many of us have ever thought of surviving loss as an art.  Or a skill.  Bad luck maybe.  Inevitable.   And of course that comes through in her poem as the tension builds.  "Then practice losing farther, losing faster."  The pace clips along, the poet knowing that we--like she herself--have no choice.     

We can feel the apprehension in the poem.  For most of us, our loses do mount.  The predictable loss of objects of course, but then memories ("places, and names") and keepsakes (the watch), the future (trips we envisioned), the past (whole continents, rivers) and finally the loss of a person we deeply love-- which may happen at any age.  That loss does seem like disaster.  We must work hard to survive the greatest losses. And yet against all odds we do. We don't crumble into dust.  It's not permitted somehow, maybe even when we'd rather. 

At the end we see that she has not actually mastered loss.  Not because she's lying ("I shan't have lied" she demurs), but because no one does.  She has had to analyze it, parse it, write about it.  Like ours, her losses are incremental.  She does miss the "you"  with the joking voice, the intimate gesture.   And--even though succeeding, as must we all--she is working overtime to accept this vaster loss and buoy herself up.  

For me, this poem confronts those experiences most universal and profound.  It reminds us how grief, loss, disaster and survival live side-by-side in our lives. But she tells us this gradually, slant, if you will.   She begins with the inconsequential, like misplaced door keys or a squandered hour, then moves in stages to the death of one we love.  And if we do survive even this greatest of losses it must be at least in part because,  as Robert Frost says in Out, Out-- we are not the one dead.  A truth that could blind. 

One Art is hard to exhaust. And isn't that a gift?  It  is one of my favorite poems for its depth and beauty. Perhaps it is, or will be, one of yours too. 

Thank you to all who create.                   Nina Naomi

 

 

THE POEM OF YOUR LIFE

 

The best poets write sonnets.  Think Shakespeare, John Donne and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. "How do I love thee?  Let me count the ways."  Fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, three quatrains and a couplet. Remember this from English class?  It's a demanding form.  Each line has 10 syllables, unaccent/accent x5.   The rhyme scheme is set.  The couplet is the conclusion.

I wonder if there's some unconscious link between the form and the trajectory of our lives:  youth, middle age, old age and death (the couplet). The form is so beloved.

A poem can be a metaphor for life but if so, I bet most of us do not live a three 4-line stanza kind-of-poem all neatly tied up in a couplet.  Nor an iambic pentameter regular-beat-kind-of-poem with an alphabet rhyme scheme. No life/strife, days/ways, see/be predictable kind of poem. 

My life is more of a free verse type poem with a few off-rhymes.  Poem/roam perhaps.  Or internal rhymes.  Verse that could be prose looked at a bit differently.  The beauty of a sonnet just isn't there.  "Let me count the ways" fits more the hither and yon of my thoughts.  An inadequate offer by a struggling poet you might say, where every line is in medias res.  

If our life were a sonnet, we would know where it's going.  There would be a plan.  We would each know which quatrain we're in, some of us, like me, nearing the couplet.  A beautiful, orderly life.  But most of us don't have that.  Maybe none of us does.

And yet the poems of our lives have some grace, do they not?  Care has been taken.  There are themes that can be followed.  A few words jar, but not all.  The internal rhymes in fact are quite good.  The beat, though irregular, is still pleasing.  

If someone recited your poem (or mine) we might not turn away.  After all, prose poems can be satisfactory too.  Not "a little world made cunningly," but worthy surely.  Given us from God.

Maybe dividing one's life into quatrains isn't fail-safe.  Maybe meandering is a better way, and more accurate.   Joys overlap tragedies, healing interrupts grief, love creates a bulwark against despair.  Bodies contract while minds expand.  Sensations grow richer. Shallowness disappears.  The unknown becomes known. Order is illusive.  Often the more important the event, the less we anticipate it.  Such is how God has created us and our lives. 

If my poem lay crumpled I would smooth it out and read it.  I'm sure I would.  Then read it again.  I wouldn't be grateful for every sadness or trauma, but at least a few lines in the poem would be about forgiveness, given and sought

After all is said and done, if I found my poem I would keep it.  Maybe you would keep yours too. 

 

ANYTHING THAT LIFTS OUR SPIRITS

 

Mt. Washington, NH

This blog began in 2017 on our first Princeton, New Jersey adventure.  This is our third.  We all need adventures, small and large.  I count almost anything.  Anything that lifts our spirits.  It can be a day kayaking, a pile of new books to read, some new spices to upgrade my cooking, you name it.  

We just came back from the nicest road trip.  This was something I yearned for pre-vaccine.  I wish I could say post-pandemic, but we reached a new milestone of 711,522 US deaths from Covid as of today.  The last 21 hours added 2,522 deaths; 97% were unvaccinated. That's 2,446 preventable deaths in less than a day. In my home state, 133 North Carolinians were added to the tally.  An unhappy thought. I can't fathom not being vaccinated.  We all need a spirit boost.    

For my husband and me, our two shots of Moderna are holding steady and we are grateful.  We felt safe to plan this trip to Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine and Connecticut.  I  never saw New England in the fall before. The leaves are a palate of their own, the reds sharper, the russets deeper, the yellows brighter. We live in the Piedmont North Carolina woods where autumn is not this luminous. No wonder the rest of the country descends on New England this time of year.  And yet it isn't crowded.  Plenty of countryside.  

 

Dickinson Home, Amherst, MA

Emily Dickinson Grave with Offerings

We began in Amherst, MA where Emily Dickinson lived and died.  We sat in her garden and visited her grave.  We saw the church her family attended. My life would be less without her poetry.  The world would be less.  Perhaps you feel the same. Surely those who left sweet offerings on her tombstone do.  Even now, remembering her everyday realm feels momentous.  Reading her poetry always lifts my heart.  We don't need to travel for that.  We can find the world in her poetry. 

 

Frost Home, Franconia, NH

We also took a road less traveled, overgrown and untrodden, high in the New Hampshire hills to see where Robert Frost lived and wrote.  When you're there it feels like you can hear his gravelly voice reciting "The Gift Outright" at President Kennedy's inauguration.  Later we hiked the Flume Gorge in Franconia Notch State Park, the most rigorous part of the trip for me.   

Flume Gorge, Mt. Liberty

The Gorge extends 800 feet horizontally with walls of granite that rise to 90 feet and are as narrow as 12 feet apart, with roaring cascades and waterfalls. A loud chasm with board walks and railings.  Tiring but not unsafe. When we came once decades ago my husband and I were both more agile.  Aren't places like this wonderful?

Do you love traveling in this country?  I do.  Day trip, road trip, camping, a weekender, a local get-away, a mini-break.  All of these lift our spirits.  Being so far from home and long-planned made this a bigger than usual adventure for us. I know life can be hard.  Mine often is.  But somehow after this I'm feeling like there can always be something good around the corner.                   

                                            Nina Naomi

 

"NO ONE SHOULD CRY ALONE," THREE POEMS BY NINA NAOMI

A wounded heart can still sing. 

Though she may sing of sadness and pain,

She can also sing of passion and love.

A wounded heart can still sing.

Though she may sing of sorrow and loss,

She can also sing of sweetness and joy.

Love her, console her, offer her your own listening heart.  

No one should cry alone.

 

Later doesn't matter.

Later isn't now.

Night will come as it does.

But now, now is pure, 

Present like a child.   

Never thinking it will be tired. 

 

I saw the clouds gather

Gray on the horizon.

Lines move east to west

Heavy with rain. 

Come in, come in.

Don't wait for the storm. 

 

 

 

  

SEVEN STANZAS AT EASTER

 

John Updike wrote the most famous Easter poem of the second half of the 20th century.  If you believe, or want to, it is worth rereading.  

SEVEN STANZAS AT EASTER (1960)

S1                                   Make no mistake:  if He rose at all

it was as His body;

if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules

reknit, the amino acids rekindle,

the Church will fall.

If I'm not in a hurry, I find God in nature every time I walk outdoors.  But loving God's creation isn't a belief.  A belief is knowing that the tomb was really empty and that the man Jesus showed his pierced palms to Thomas.  Updike's "if" in line 1 is not hedging his bets, and we don't need to hedge ours.  

S2                                       It was not as the flowers,

each soft Spring recurrent;

it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled

eyes of the eleven apostles;

it was as His flesh; ours. 

His flesh rose and ours will too.  That's the promise of Easter.  We won't turn into Monarchs floating among the Lantana.  Our very bodies will walk (or stand or sit or lie) with the risen Lord.  

S3                                 The same hinged thumbs and toes,

the same valved heart

that-pierced-died, withered, paused, and then

regathered out of enduring Might

new strength to enclose. 

 More anatomy.  As His heart re-beat, so will ours.

S4                               Let us not mock God with metaphor,

analogy, sidestepping, transcendence

making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the

faded credulity of earlier ages:

let us walk through the door.

The Resurrection is not a parable.  Not a puzzling little narrative where one thing might stand for something else.  It is simply, literally, true. It needs no interpretation. Jesus rose from the dead.  That's why he is the Christ.  Take a breath.  Open the door to the room of faith and walk in.

S5                            The stone is rolled back, not paper-mache,

not a stone in a story,

but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow

grinding of time will eclipse for each of us

the wide light of day. 

It's all literal.  The wounds, the death, the grave, the stone.  And next comes the angel, literal too, wearing a garment that somebody wove!  No one imagined the angel.  We don't need our imaginations here. 

S6                                And if we have an angel at the tomb,

make it a real angel,

weighty with Max Planck's quanta, vivid with hair,

opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen

spun on a definite loom.

S7                           Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,

for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,

lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are

embarrassed by the miracle,

and crushed by remonstrance.  

I remember (always) when our son died.  Instead of harming my faith, his death made it more logical.  We wouldn't be created in all our complexity to end on the 9th Floor of Duke Medical Center.  Now that would be ridiculous, not eternal life.

Let's have a wonderful death and resurrection.  Happy Easter!  

                                                    Nina Naomi 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"SMALL KINDNESSES" BY DANUSHA LAMERIS

                                      Small Kindnesses

              I've been thinking about the way, when you walk
              down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
              to let you by.  Or how strangers still say "bless you"
              when someone sneezes, a leftover
              from the Bubonic plague.  "Don't die," we are saying.
              And sometimes when you spill lemons 
              from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
              pick them up.  Mostly we don't want to harm each other.
              We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
              and to say thank you to the person handing it.  To smile
              at them and for them to smile back.  For the waitress
              to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
              and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
              We have so little of each other, now.  So far from tribe and fire.
              Only these brief moments of exchange.
              What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, 
              these fleeting temples we make together when we say, "Here,
              have my seat," "Go ahead - you first," "I like your hat." 
                                                       by Danusha Lameris

What do you think?  Do you like this?  The author is poet laureate of Santa Cruz County, California.  It's wonderful to me that Santa Cruz County has its own poet laureate. I know that the US has a poet laureate and that North Carolina does, as other states do.  And about a dozen national governments, including Great Britain.  I even knew that the poet Petrarch was crowned Poet Laureate in Rome (in 1341 but I didn't know the date), hence the term "laureate."  My own little corner of the world has its Piedmont Laureate (www.piedmontlaureate.org), not necessarily a poet, but someone who promotes the literary arts in the schools and community.  For a US county or city or Borough (Fresno, CA and the Borough of Brooklyn for example) to want poetry as part of its identity is encouraging I think.

After all, look at Lameris' poem.  I read an analysis by another poet, Naomi Nye, in the NYT magazine (Sept. 19, 2019).  She says that the poem breezes compliments and simple care, is a catalogue of small encouragements and celebrates graciousness within the community.  One reader's comments caught what I bet many of us feel.  She wrote, "When I read this poem everything around me softened for a moment."  Yes, me too.  

The poem makes me especially think about interactions between women, how we chat with strangers and affirm each other. I feel like I can say that without fear of contradiction.  How many times haven't I received a compliment on my mustard-yellow hobo bag? Or my little peep-toe flats that tie with a grosgrain ribbon?  If your tag shows someone just might tuck it in for you.  Or pick-up something you've dropped but not noticed.  I like it that when you hear a "Bless You" from a neighboring carrel it means "Don't die."  We're not saying that literally of course, but the history of the courtesy shows how long we have been caring for one another.   

Small kindnesses always stand for something more, something unspoken:  our needs, our gifts, how we navigate the rigors of life.  As an English teacher once, someone who can find solace in John Donne or Emily Dickinson or Mary Oliver, I am glad to now be acquainted with the Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County, CA.  I'll start with The Moons of August (2013) and go from there.  

     What's gone
     Is not quite gone, but lingers, 
     Not the language, but the bones
     of the language.  Not the beloved,
     but the dark bed the beloved makes
     inside our bodies. 

I can't wait to read more of this poet.  "The the dark bed the beloved makes inside our bodies."  Wow.  Can language get better than that?  Such an unexpected blessing found today.  
                                                    Nina Naomi
 




 

IN THE MOOD FOR BEGINNING FRESH?

It's almost Easter.  Today is Holy Saturday, for Christians a day of waiting while Jesus remains in the tomb.  The crucifixion of Good Friday is over.  At sundown the Easter vigil begins, the wait for the Resurrection.  A lot happened on this day over 2,000 years ago.  Just as a lot happened yesterday on the Friday called Good.

Tomorrow is a day for new beginnings. Easter always is.  Everyone has ordered lilies to adorn the sanctuary, many in memory of loved ones who have died, us included.  I have a ham in the fridge waiting to be baked,  Easter baskets shopped at Five Below filled with non-traditional things like sound-activated LED lights and a hands-free iPhone neck mount (for the teenagers) and chocolate. Yesterday we had readings about the Stations of the Cross and left the church in silence. We sang the hymns sung only once a year yet known by heart. "Oh Sacred Head Now Wounded," a bit gruesome, like hanging on a cross.  The church lost power because we were under tornado warnings, but it didn't matter.  Darkness was good.   

Last year and this year Passover fell on Good Friday. Last year we shared a Passover meal with Jewish friends.  It was a perfect transition--service at Friday noon, Passover meal in the evening, Holy Saturday then Easter Sunday.  This year again it's a special time around the world.  If you are one of these religions I hope for you all the blessings of your faith.  For me that means chastened, watchful, hopeful, attuned to grief yet waiting on tiptoe in anticipation of resplendence.  Spring must be a metaphor for all this!

In my mood for beginning fresh I've turned to Mary Oliver.  Many of us feel that poets know more about us than we do ourselves.  The only other poet Oliver reminds me of is Emily Dickinson.  Christian imagery everywhere, but not confessions of faith, not like we see in Dante or Milton or Hopkins or Donne or the other great Christian poets.  If you feel like reading about her, try "Why We Need Mary Oliver's Poems" by Debra Dean Murphy in The Christian Century, April 13, 2017 (www.christiancentury.org).  In the meantime, here's an Oliver poem that I think offers just the freshness we might be longing for this special time of year.  

WILD GEESE

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain 

are moving across the landscapes, 

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, 

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

 the world offers itself to your imagination, 

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things. 

 

  

"THIS IS MY LIFE AND I FEEL SO ALIVE" m.k.

I found a young poet, new to me.  I hope you like this poem too. 

I WANT TO WAKE UP EVERY MORNING,

EXCITED FOR WHAT IS TO COME.

I WANT TO LOOK UP AT THE SKY 

AND FEEL THE WARM SUN ON MY FACE.

I WANT TO GO ON WALKS AND HIKES

AND FEEL HEALTHY AND STRONG.

I WANT TO FEEL PRODUCTIVE AND SATISFIED.

I WANT TO TAKE MORE PHOTOGRAPHS

AND TAKE UP NEW HOBBIES.

I WANT TO BECOME FRIENDS

WITH MORE INTERESTING PEOPLE

WHO WILL TEACH ME ABOUT

PLACES I'VE NEVER BEEN.

I WANT TO FEEL ALIVE.  
m.k.

Isn't a lot of what she wants what we want? This was written by the poet Madisen Kuhn who goes by m.k.  She also wrote this, and at age 17,

 I will not ask you to stay

If you must go, go

I don't need you

I will breathe (carefully) without you

I will smile (slowly) without you

I will go on (eventually) without you 

The pace of this poem is just right. It matches the thoughts.  Mostly one syllable words. You can read the first 3 lines quickly.  They're kind of gutsy.  Then in the last 3 lines we see that the "go I don't need you" is bravado. The pace changes, we get parentheses and multi-syllable words.  Even the one syllable words, "smile" and "breathe" take longer to say. The poem slows with the poet's thoughts.  No bravado now.  The depth of the loss is revealed, but it's not unbearable.  There's hope. Tentative, but still . . . she's young.  She knows her life will go on.  The poet took care with this poem. 
 
Many of her other lines are lovely too.  

you are the song 
i want to listen to

Have we felt this way about someone we love?  Do we feel this way now?  This poem ends,

and oh God
this is my life and

i feel so alive 

Some days I wonder, how can the work of someone born in 1996, just 22 years ago, touch my emotions?  But it does.  So age--youth, middle age or old age--is no barrier.  Creativity, thoughtfulness, soulfulness are not age-bound.  That is the lesson I'm learning.  Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) was young when she wrote The Bell Jar. I was young when I read it.  John Keats (1795-1821)was young when he wrote and young when he died.  I enjoyed him when I was young and can enjoy him now, even his prose.  When Keats was depressed he wrote, 

 I am in that temper that if I were under water

 I would scarcely kick to come to the top. 

Such an image.  So much less formal than his poetry. 

John Milton (1608-1674) wrote as an old man.  He could not see.  I studied Paradise Lost in college.  I was young, he was old.  After my course in Milton I chose to be baptized and confirmed.  So strong was his influence.

Milton's Sonnet XIX about his blindness ends with the line, 

They also serve who only stand and wait. 

Just 8 words.  But so powerful.  The idea pushes no one aside.  We do not have to earn God's love with talents we may not have.  We can stand and wait.  We can do this no matter what our age or abilities--young, old, able or challenged.  How reassuring. 

Beethoven (1770-1827) composed when old and deaf.  Van Gogh died at 37.  So, yes, age is not relevant. None of us knows who will have a vertical audience, narrow but lasting through the ages, who will have a horizontal audience (best sellers that disappear as their replacement arrives), who will go unrecognized in their lifetime only to inspire after their death (Anne Frank, Van Gogh, Emily Dickinson), who journals and diaries in secret never to be known . . . .

Is there a moral or conclusion to be drawn? I don't know. Maybe that whatever our age this is our life and we can feel so alive.  We can learn from anyone.  We can teach anyone.  We can be public.  We can be private. We can be the one who stands and waits.