Tract by William Carlos Williams | Poetry Foundation

Death is pushed to the margins in modern life. There is much drama about the funeral, but this often remains external and superficial. Our consumerist society has lost the sense of ritual and wisdom necessary to acknowledge this rite of passage. The person who has entered the voyage of death needs more in-depth care.

Today, most of us lack the direct experience of being witness to a meaningful and family-centered dying process. We have outsourced the washing, dressing, and burial of the body of our beloved. Furthermore, just as grief is too often viewed as an illness to overcome, death, too, is seen as something to “fight.”

The word selah (Hebrew: ) — “to pause, reflect, and feel meaning” — appears almost seventy times in the poetry of the Psalms. Grief by its nature is poetical, elegiac. And poetry, like grief, is subversive, unbridled, and disobedient. Poetry violates linguistic norms because it must. Poetry helps us feel. And when we allow ourselves to feel that wh