“narrative poem without the obvious rhyme scheme about the loss of someone you only know because they are married to someone you work with”

The morning after, gossip tilted quietly  
in the breakroom’s blue-lit chill—  
Sara’s wife had passed,  
a softness folded away in the dark  
while Sara slept, unaware,  
in their borrowed time.

She wasn’t someone I ever truly met—  
her presence was a photograph  
framed in Sara’s office.  
Warm laugh behind glass,  
a name stated in passing,  
an invitation declined at company picnics.

And now, the world passes her absence  
like a low note in a symphony,  
and I am awkward in my empathy—  
seeing Sara’s shoulders shrink,  
the gentle hoarseness in her greetings,  
hands cradling a coffee mug, untouched.

I want to say I’m sorry,  
but the words seem too large,  
like a coat borrowed from someone  
else’s winter.  
My knowledge of grief  
is a foreign language—  
one I can only stammer in,  
hoping the pity in my eyes  
doesn’t sound like rehearsed kindness.

At lunch, we speak trivial things.  
New projects. The printer’s hum.  
Grief drapes itself quietly  
between her sentences and mine,  
and though I never held  
her wife’s hand or heard her voice,  
the echo of loss  
in the back halls  
feels like a shadow  
we must both walk through—  
each step uncertain, but trying  
not to let her walk alone.

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