Do You Consider Writing to be Therapeutic? by Andrew Grace

After my father died
I should have gone to therapy.
I tried instead to solve my grief
with alcohol and poems.
Now I am almost 40
and all I can tell you about grief
is that when I found my father
on the floor of the machine shed
the radio was on and wind
pushed against corrugated metal.
Of course I still hear it.
I should have talked
to someone before now
and not you. Poetry is not talking.
This is just art
and therefore could never
cover my ears when I, suddenly,
am back in the shed
and I learn again that my father
has died every day
since he died.