Grief is a Second Language"

Grief is a Second Language

A poetic exploration of mourning across cultures

~ by Ahmar

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I. In the Tongue of Silence — “Mutismo” (Italian)

In Napoli, where vowels bloom like jasmine,

they say silence is the first sound of sorrow.

A mother lights candles for a son never found—

his name swallowed by the Mediterranean.

The sea speaks in broken verbs:

perduto, aspettare, non ritorna.

Grief is an opera without lyrics,

just the slow aria of empty chairs.

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II. In the Syntax of Rain — “Shigemi” (Japanese)

Rain folds over Kyoto like apology.

There is no loud mourning here,

only the quiet formality of tea and incense.

Grandmothers bow to ancestors with practiced hands,

as if sorrow could be made polite.

They say, mono no aware — the pathos of things —

as cherry blossoms drift toward soil,

each petal a particle of goodbye.

Even grief must bow before beauty.

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III. In the Grammar of the Desert — “Huzn” (Arabic)

In the Maghreb, grief rides the wind.

Huzn is the ache behind the eyes,

the dust in the lungs that never clears.

Women wail into clay jars,

capturing lament like perfume,

their cries ancient as calligraphy.

Here, sorrow is a script learned by the body,

recited by hips swaying at funerals,

where each ululation is a vowel of survival.

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IV. In the Tense of the Living Dead — “Luto” (Spanish)

In Bogotá, grief is worn like a shawl.

Luto — the mourning black —

wraps around shoulders like a second skin.

Children trace absent names on fogged glass,

mothers cook for mouths no longer hungry.

Time freezes in a tense that forgets motion,

verbs curled up like old photographs.

It is a grammar of remembering:

“He was,” not “He is.”

“He would have been,” not “He will.”

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V. In the Cadence of Drumming Bones — “Ukufa” (Zulu)

The drumbeat tells you what the mouth cannot.

In the villages of KwaZulu-Natal,

they bury the dead with rhythm.

Ukufa — death — is not the end,

but a returning echo.

Grief here has choreography,

feet pounding red earth until the dust rises,

as if to remind the ancestors:

We are still here. We remember.

We speak your names through our soles.

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VI. In the Alphabet of Cold — “Sorg” (Norwegian)

North of the Arctic Circle,

grief is a long winter.

Sorg is the slow thaw of memory,

each ice crystal holding a fractured face.

Candles flicker in frost-covered windows—

the Norse gods say little of loss.

But in Sámi tongues, there is a word for

“the ache when someone’s breath lingers in a room.”

A grief that hibernates under the ribs.

A language only silence can speak.

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VII. In the Slang of Cities — “Loss” (English)

In London, New York, Lagos, and Manila,

grief speaks in slang.

“She passed,” “He’s gone,” “We lost him.”

Casual, clipped — as if grief were

a missed bus, a dropped call.

But the undertow pulls hard.

Behind every euphemism is a scream

in an alley, behind every “Sorry for your loss,”

a subway train that stutters with ghosts.

Here, mourning is masked in metaphors,

a second tongue for those too tired to cry.

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VIII. In the Dialect of the Sacred — “Ashk” (Persian)

In Shiraz, they speak of ashk —

tears — as sacred water.

To weep is to pray without words.

Rumi wrote, “Don’t grieve. Anything you lose

comes round in another form.”

But still, they mourn in poetry,

each verse a tombstone,

each metaphor a rebirth.

Here, grief is holy,

carried like a relic in the mouth,

a dialect of the divine.

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IX. In the Script of the Self — “Unspoken” (Universal)

Every soul holds a private dialect

no dictionary has yet defined.

The language of the inner ache,

the murmur before sleep,

the cracked whisper into the pillow.

Grief is a second language

because the first — joy —

no longer holds meaning.

And in learning this new tongue,

we realize: everyone is multilingual

in sorrow.

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Epilogue

To mourn is to translate the unsayable.

To write elegies in borrowed syllables.

To find the root of “bereft” in every language

and feel it bloom inside your chest.

Grief is not foreign.

It is a shared fluency,

an unwritten passport stamped

in tears.