Writing Reflections: Sinking

Today’s Writing Reflection is going to be a little different. I want to focus on a particular kind of writing that I do a lot by analyzing a poem that I feel is the epitome of the theme of grief. If you have followed me for a while, you have probably noticed that I have been writing a lot on grief over the past year. From the short story “The Dreamwalker’s Mission” to the poem “The Hunt of Grief”, the theme of grief has dominated several of my works lately. That’s because my mother died last July, and the only thing that has been alleviating it has been to write about grief. That doesn’t mean that writing about grief has been easy; it just means that it has been coming more naturally to me than other themes and topics. It’s made everything that I write more personal, more me, and that is what I want to focus on today.

The poem that I want to analyze is a Top Story called “Sinking”. Like with other poems I have analyzed, I will include both the text of the poem and the link to the original poem below:

My head is beneath water

My legs and arms are flailing

I can’t breach the surface

No matter how hard I kick

 

* * *

 

Bubbles escape my lips

Trailing up toward the sunlight

Taking my breath away from me

As I grow more and more lightheaded

 

* * *

 

I once reached for you to guide me to the surface

Both my buoy and my anchor

But now when I claw at the water

All I find is empty space

 

* * *

 

I sink lower and lower

My panic rising in my throat

The darkness wraps itself around me

I dread the feel of rock bottom beneath me

 

* * *

 

My vision is distorted

My breath struggles to sustain me

My mind is forever clouded

But I never lose sight of the light on the surface

--Stephanie Hoogstad, "Sinking"

I wrote this poem while lying on the couch thinking about how much I missed my mother and how much I needed her. I felt like I couldn’t breathe without her, let alone keep functioning, and I needed a way to capture that feeling. The only thing that felt close to that feeling was the feeling of sinking, of sinking towards rock bottom, and not being able to find the way back to the surface—yet.

I knew that I had to convey the feeling in a way that made me feel it again when I read it, otherwise the emotion would not be felt by the reader. So, it had to be painful for me to read—and it is painful for me to read, every time that I read it. Even reading it to write this story, I started having a hard time breathing and started to feel the need to cry because I was reliving those emotions that I felt the day that I wrote it.

However, the poem could not just be solely about grief. I have learned that about grief poems ever since I started writing them consistently. Grief poems that are only about grief are flat. They make us feel, yes, but they have no evolution. They leave us feeling almost emotionless, they are so depressing. So, I put in a little light of hope at the end of the poem…literally. It is just a single line—“But I never lose sight of the light on the surface”—but it is enough to give the reader hope that the narrator has not given up—that I have not given up. It does not matter whether that is true or not; it only matters that I give the reader the sense that that is the truth, that there is a sparkle of hope left. This creates an evolution to the poem that brings life to it and raises the reader up, rather than dragging them down.

No poem is perfect. I’m sure that the language could be more sophisticated, more nuanced, that the imagery could be more distinct and vivid. But for what I was trying to achieve, I must say, this poem is perfect enough. It conveys the grief that I felt, and yet it lets there be some hope in the end. For without hope, what is the point of grief? Can we grow from our grief without hope that it will get better?

Have you ever written on grief? What is your approach? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!

Are there any old works of mine that you would like me to revisit? Leave those in the comments as well!