::: ember + verse

a poem written by firelight, and what it cost to get there

I don’t write my best in daylight when grief is close.

Daylight is useful. It makes lists, folds laundry, and convinces me I’m fine because I’m moving.

It also gives me a thousand bright reasons not to sit still long enough to hear what’s waiting underneath the noise.

Grief is patient. It waits for the house to go quiet.

That December night in 2024, four years after my daddy died and two after my momma, the fire had settled into embers.

I was working on a women’s fiction draft about a woman who loses her husband and her mother in the same impossible moment. I gave her that loss because I didn’t know what else to do with mine.

Fiction can hold what the body can’t.

I’d been typing for hours when the words started to thin. My fourth cup of cocoa had gone cold. Outside, the Arkansas night pressed against the windows. On the page, my protagonist was still in chapter six… still trying to remember how to be brave.

I knew the feeling.

That’s what nobody tells you about writing through grief: it doesn’t heal you neatly. It doesn’t tie anything up. It doesn’t hand back your people with a bow on top.

Sometimes it just gives the ache a place to live for a while.

I didn’t finish the story that night. I still haven’t. Maybe that’s not what the night was for. Maybe it was for the sitting. The fire. The cold cocoa. The page.

And then, somewhere between one more thought and one more breath, the prose gave way.

A poem came instead.

ember + verse

tonight my bare feet curl against  
the hardwood floor, and the fire  
spits embers like small stars  
coming loose in the dark

my iPad glows blue-white  
against the honey of the room  
and my cocoa has gone cold again  
forgotten beside chapter six

outside, winter presses  
her face to the window  
while my protagonist learns  
how to be brave

so do I

the fire doesn’t ask questions  
when I read the lines aloud  
or when I delete them  
or when my hands shake

it only burns  
steady and unafraid  
as if it knows  
what I keep forgetting:

that grief can sit beside me  
without breaking me  

that words can still arrive  
when I’m not ready for them  

that something holy lives  
in the making

and maybe that is all this is:  
a woman, her ghosts,  
a half-written novel,  
learning how to turn  
what hurts  
into light

~ Mary Kaye Chambers 
   12/4/24

That night, the story stayed unfinished. The grief stayed too, the way it always does now that I’ve made my peace with it.

But, for that one night, the time spent in prayer with my pen and the fireplace was enough.

If this firelit night stirred something in you, I’d love to hear. What’s one way you’ve let grief speak through your own creativity? Drop a comment below.

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