Grief

Nana T. Baffour-Awuah

You strange companion

who comes and goes like the wind;

a quiet breeze today, a toppling gust tomorrow

A shadow lurking around the corner,

leering from a distance

or scraping at my eyeballs

Sometimes you are everything;

air and gravity and ground beneath my feet

Sometimes you are nothing;

silence and dead stares and shapeless hollowness

Red thread lingering in everything and nothing,

if I learn what I must, will I find in you a friend?

Nana T. Baffour-Awuah (he/him) is a Ghanaian writer and editor currently based in New York. His poems, short stories, and essays have been published in Brittle Paper, Chronogram, Raven Review, African Writer, North Meridian Review, HuffPost, Sierra Nevada Review, and elsewhere. His work has also been anthologized, most recently in Creative Stillness (Gatekeeper Press, 2026) and Smitten with the Written (Arcana Poetry Press, 2026). Nana is a poetry editor for The Hummingbird and a reader for Callaloo. He is working on his first book. IG: @whatnanawrote

Grief

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