There are times, left alone with thoughts,
when grief sneaks up on me.
The last daffodils have faded, yet
I’m taken back to that January day.
Why did you wait until the morning?
I would have understood you leaving
while I held your hand. Why did you wait
until the morning? No goodbye.
I hear a clattering, a band of jackdaws
hop among the branches of the willow,
echo my questions, a reminder
of the approaching end of a season, a year, life.
Kim M. Russell, 10th April 2026
On this tenth day of April, we are a third of the way through NaPoWriMo and the optional daily prompt is taken from Geoffrey Brock’s poem, ‘Goodbye’, in which he describes grief in three short stanzas, the second of which is entirely made up of a rhetorical dialogue. Our challenge is to write meditations on grief, using Brock’s form as the ‘container’ for our poems: a few short stanzas, with a middle section in which a question is repeated with different answers given.
writing in north norfolk 
Wow that second stanza
“Why did you wait until the morning? I would have understood you leavingwhile I held your hand. Why did you waituntil the morning? No goodbye.”
Why did you wait until the morning lingers with me this morning, like a question we all seek the answer too in grief and when we lose someone. Very moving, thank you for sharing this with us.
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This touches on my own thoughts Kim 💞
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The second stanza,
“Why did you wait until the morning?
I would have understood you leaving
while I held your hand.“
Leaves a scar on your heart to lose someone and not understand the why. These words bring me to that grief, and make me understand the feeling of it just a little bit. Wonderfully written.
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Thank you so much.
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The second stanza
“Why did you wait until the morning?
I would have understood you leaving
while I held your hand. Why did you wait
until the morning? No goodbye.“
Leaves a scar on your heart to lose someone and not understand the why. These words bring me to that grief, and make me understand the feeling of it just a little bit. Wonderfully written.
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This is so good, Kim. The grief palpable. You wrote to the prompt and then some. I just read your poem to my husband. Like others, I was moved by the second stanza in particular. We often ask why in such moments. I love the jackdaws echoing the question, too, the way we often hear questions–and sometimes answers–in nature.
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