Poem: “The Process” featured in Snapdragon: A Journal of Art & Healing

 I am excited to share that my poem “The Process” is featured in the Fall 2021 issue of Snapdragon: A Journal of Art & Healing.

This year Snapdragon Journal has been focusing on grief, including how it shapes us and how we move through it. The fall issue centers on bargaining, the third phase of the stages of grief as outlined by ‎Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.

I wrote “The Process” last year, when composer Samora Pinderhughes invited folks to create art in response to his then newly-released song, “Process,” a powerful meditation on grief, loss, and the grace by which we recover. (By the way, if you haven’t heard this song, then you must go watch/listen here!)

My poem expresses what I’ve learned about grief – that it is a necessary process, one that you avoid at your own peril, and a process that if yielded to, can make you richer in heart and soul than you were before.

I couldn’t be more excited for my first published poem to be featured in Snapdragon Journal, a publication that is all about art and healing, two of my greatest passions.

Thank you to Jacinta V. White, Snapdragon Journal‘s founder and publishing editor, and poetry editor Petra Salazar for including my work among all of the moving, beautiful poems in this issue.

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LISTEN: You can hear me recite “The Process” here on my podcast, “The Sound of Solace.”

The Process

by Tiffany Nicole Fletcher

 

At my best I am

solid rock - I am a

firm structure and a

steady frame.

And there is no worst;

I am only human:

I have been waves of repeating sorrows

I have known longing, heavy like

hunger,

I have crumbled under the unforgiving weight of grief.

Grief with no name

grief with a hundred faces

grief that first  owned me

then gently      reshaped me,

and when done its work,

released me.

            I see and hear differently now.

I touch     differently now.

Now,

I do what is necessary to taste

the full sweetness of life:

I embrace the bitter; I let it

companion me too.

All of my life

I have been chasing after the moment

when someone asks me,

“What does it mean to be free?”

and I,

the answer enfleshed, finally

can say,                                  

“me”