The mirrors were covered and the chairs were low
and people came with food and sat for hours
in the house that felt different, in the slow
accumulation of the mourning’s powers.
For seven days the family stayed inside
and let the community come to them,
and everyone who entered brought a wide
offering of memory and requiem.
Sitting shiva, the community comes to you,
you don’t have to leave the house to work through
the first impossible week of being without,
you let the people come and let them shout
their condolences and stories, sitting shiva through.
There’s wisdom in the obligation of the food,
in making sure the mourning family eats,
in the covered mirrors that preclude
vanity in grief, in the low wooden seats
that bring the mourner down from ordinary height
to something more appropriate to loss,
the whole ritual acknowledging the right
of grief to be the center, bear its cost.
I’ve been to three shivas in my life and felt
the weight of what the ritual was doing:
containing grief the way a frame contains and dealt
with all the excess, structuring the viewing
of the loss in seven manageable days
of community and food and story-telling,
a container for the grief’s unruly ways,
a held space for the mourning and the swelling.