“I hypnotized trees”: A Survey of Heartbreak Poetry

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Experiencing tragedy is often correlated with creative genius (take a look at the biography of every other famous poet and you’ll likely be able to find tragic circumstances lining up with what is now the stereotypical artist’s plight, for example, the life Sylvia Plath or Edgar Allan Poe). 

However, I’d like to argue that heartbreak can be one of the most creatively stifling experiences to navigate through, not because you’ve “lost your muse,” but because for days or weeks or months after you wake up feeling like your whole body, once human, is now a piece of soft rotting fruit with sick yellow edges, or a series of heart palpitations, or the slate grey color of the atmosphere when it can only muster a snow-less winter—any way you feel, you sometimes are something that cannot speak, write, conjure words.   

Emotional nerves exposed, wouldn’t this make for poetry? Maybe, but I’d say more often than not, not right away. You may feel anything you write is overdramatic, a reflection of the time stopped in your world when you know everyone else’s is moving and they cannot stop and wait for you. 

And while poetry is fueled by emotion, poets aren’t completely void of anything else but emotion, night and day. Heartbreak can make you feel as if emotion is all that is left of you, and often eventually leaves you in a state of exhaustion and numbness. Not ideal circumstances for writing. Luckily, while all your creativity runs dry to deal with grief, there are other poets and other poems that can help breathe life back into you and assist in the healing process. 

Take a breath and let a few other voices carry the weight for a few minutes. 

Noelle Kocot, The Peace That So Lovingly Descends

‘You’ have transformed into ‘my loss.’

The nettles in your vanished hair

Restore the absolute truth

Of warring animals without a haven.

I know, I’m as pathetic as a railroad

Without tracks.  In June, I eat

The lonesome berries from the branches.

What can I say, except the forecast

Never changes.  I sleep without you,

And the letters that you sent

Are now faded into failed lessons

Of an animal that’s found a home.  This.

Sarah Kay, The Type

Lucas Regazzi, Small

You’re not doing well and finally I don’t have to

pretend to be so interested in your on going tragedy,

but

I’ll rob the bank that gave you the impression that

money is more fruitful than words, and

I’ll cut holes in the ozone if it means you have one less day of rain.

I’ll walk you to the hospital, 

I’ll wait in a white room that reeks of hand sanitizer and latex for the results from the MRI scan that tries to 

locate the malady that keeps your mind guessing, and

I want to write you a poem every day until my hand breaks

and assure you that you’ll find your place, 

it’s just 

the world has a funny way of

hiding spots fertile enough for

bodies like yours to grow roots.

and

I miss you like a dart hits the iris of a bullseye,

or a train ticket screams 4:30 at 4:47, I

wanted to tell you that it’s my birthday on Thursday

and I would have wanted you to 

give me the gift of your guts on the floor, one last time,

to see if you still had it in you.

I hope our ghosts aren’t eating you alive.

If I’m to speak for myself, I’ll tell you that

the universe is twice as big as we think it is

and you’re the only one that made that idea

less devastating.

Carrie Rudzinski, The Bed

Christopher Salerno, Is It Better Where You Are?

The bakery’s graffiti either spells HOPE

or NOPE. But hope and results

are different, said Fanny Brawne to her Keats

voiding his unreasonable lung.

Getting off the medicine

completely means light again

blinking to light. Device returned

to its factory settings. The complete black

of before the meteor shower

above the bakery. If you lose the smell

of leather, lemon, or rose,

studies show you will fail at being,

like Keats. I keep watching the same meteor

shower videos on YouTube

where awe is always a question of scale.

Night can be moths or weather, pulled in the dark.

The bakery, now, is beginning to close.

My arrhythmic heart

aches for the kind of dramatic arc

one can’t shop for. Or else to lease

what’s real for a while—

is this the good kind of consumption?

I wonder over the weight

of meaning. The difference between

hull and seed. The sugary

donut and its graceful hole. The greasy

bags that everyone leaves

in the alley leading to my door.

These scraps I work at like a crow.

Anna Binkovitz, On Being Left

Sarah Messer, Spark of the Sky Stag’s Great Heart

strung from a thought arrived through the keyhole grasping

the hand of another

I will begin with my mouth

then live with antlers remembering the light inside, always to 

breathe this unforgetting

and his body shaped like a crabapple tree

or a mother raised by a wolf looking back at the mirror

and trying not to break anvils on the bottles of blame

in another life: smell of moss, stream water, depressions of dark 

orange rocks which trap tiny fish

the consequence of silence: a field beneath opening clouds

on that morning I woke to the sound of the blue jay and used a 

small silver key

some day we will all be gone from this place

now that the live oak has thrown down all its caramel-colored

 leaves, thought lives in the ear-shaped idea of this only

Neil Hilborn, Future Tense

Maureen Thorson, excerpt from Applies to Oranges

At first heartbreak made me beautiful.

My skin fluoresced. I hypnotized trees.

The orphans followed me around town,

drunk on my pain. I ate only my own

hunger, gave off a scent like bitter oranges

or chlorine. Loss left me strangely whole,

as if my sadness, were it strong enough,

could turn your ship around. That was back

when I aged. Now, like an astronomer

who seeks no first causes, but only to map

the connections pinned out over the sea,

I want to diagram the light that shines out

through the holes you pricked into me.