The Power of Collective Sorrow

photo by Charlotte Knight, unsplash

I am crying again.
I know that you cry too,
As part of life within the sphere of Gaia,
how can we not
feel our mother dying.
And feeling this,
how deny our sorrow.

Do not allow your mourning to be shrunk
to something merely personal,
or something named in the manual,
the DSM that pins us to a board
as individual specimens,
crazy, separate and dead.

Neither hide your mourning,
But let us gather for the crying.
As we unleash the howl
of our collective sorrow,
let the grieving give us life.
Let its potent power
pour through our human sinews.
We must let it, yes, let it rip us open.
Let collective sorrow make us fierce
with unexpected strength.

If this grieving be a deathwatch,
then let us come full present
to the bedside of our miracle Earth,
to the bedside of her disappearing species.
Yes, let our terrible task
be beholding what we’ve done.
There is no running from the room.
Our bodies know the Earth is suffering.
Our bodies need to cry.
To honor her with witness,
we must feel the breadth and depth
of our collective sorrow.

When we own our anguish
and lay it bare to one another,
when we claim our crying as collective,
we connect and we enlarge,
we amass an energy,
a force that bursts our hearts
and multiplies our chance
to change the outcome for the dying world.

Let us gather now and own the crying.
Feel the collective sorrow
empower us to change.
Feel the collective sorrow
thrust us roughly forth,
and evolve us  into beings
we’ve been meant to be,
into the ones who came
to create with tears the Turning Time.

©Susa Silvermarie 2025

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