5 Reading and Writing Prompts to Help You Navigate Grief

August 30 is National Grief Awareness Day, a day dedicated to normalizing grief and opening a dialogue surrounding it. While grief—with all its nuances and non-linear milestones—can be difficult to talk about in the outside world, this complicated emotion and those experiencing it can always find a home in poetry. That’s because poetry is where we can dig into our deepest feelings and sit with them, knowing there’s no need to reach a deadline or find a solution. When grief feels especially heavy or lonely, find company with these poetic reading and writing exercises. 

Take grief at your own pace with a grief-themed poetry anthology. 

Grief is overwhelming. While there’s no way to fully put down your grief, some days you might want to spend a long time processing, while other days only short bursts of journaling or reflection feel manageable. A poetry anthology is the perfect type of book to meet you in this moment. The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing, edited by New Yorker poetry editor Kevin Young, brings together 150 poems about the diverse and ongoing journey of grief, including poems by Sharon Olds, Anne Sexton, Emily Dickinson, and many other beloved voices. Read as many poems as you want—whether that’s getting through the whole book in one morning, or reading a poem a day and pairing it with a journaling or meditation session. 

Time travel by writing a poem about your best memory. 

Time isn’t linear in poetry, giving us the opportunity to look toward the future or revisit the past. In fact, when reading some of your favorite poetry, you likely feel totally transported into someone else’s experience or to an earlier moment in your own life. Honor your grief by writing a poem about one of your favorite or most special memories with your loved one. 

Engage the senses by writing a poem based on a photo. 

Poetry can be multimodal, and provides a soothing opportunity to delve into rich imagery. Look back at some of your favorite photos of who or what you’re grieving, then translate the moments in these photos into a poem. What did the moment depicted in that photo sound, smell, look, and feel like? What makes it so memorable? 

Explore poetry as a type of spell, letter, or incantation. 

Some of my favorite poems about grief are Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s “Miss you” poems, which they read and discuss on an episode of the Poetry Magazine podcast. In this conversation, they speak about using these “Miss you” poems as a kind of a spell to bring a beloved friend back to them. They say the act of writing these poems felt conversational and tangible. Explore doing the same thing with a poem through making it a direct address. 

Write short poems that capture a moment in time. 

Poems like Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s “Miss you” poems are long and winding. While writing a piece like this can be cathartic, some poets prefer to process their grief in bite-sized chunks or through one central image. If this approach feels better to you, you can take inspiration from award-winning poet Victoria Chang, whose grief inspired and informed her collection Obit. This collection contains short, paragraph-shaped prose poetry and continually returns to the formal device of a tanka, a poem that consists of five lines, alternating between lines of five and seven syllables. 

Needing more comfort poetry? Find solace and strength in our roundup of Mary Oliver poems for grieving hearts.