cynthia loves poetry

You know those moments in conversation when someone pauses, and that pause says more than words ever could? Poetry knows about those moments. Poetry lives in those moments. Take my poem “Ghosts of children linger.”

When I write:

Forlorn in hollow silence
               alone in a dusty attic
               haunting barren halls
                                             gloomy
                              desolate
               corridors

See how those single words—”gloomy,” “desolate”—stand alone? How they create their own islands of meaning? That’s not accident. That’s the weight of absence made visible on the page.

White Space as a Mirror of Loss
When people vanish from our lives—whether through distance, time, or more permanent goodbyes—they leave spaces.

holiday table set for none
ghosted by empty chairs
stories untold
questions unanswered
               cloth set heavy with
               silent goodbyes

These gaps appear in our homes—empty chairs, silent rooms, photo albums gathering dust. Just as these physical spaces mark absence, the flow of words on the page reveals loss in a different way:

"Beyond the mists of bygone days, they wander foreign paths in worlds apart—perhaps they meandered and danced and promised their hearts in fairy circles, gone so far from home."

Notice how this passage flows in an unbroken stream? That’s how memory works too—sometimes rushing forward in a flood of words, as if stopping to breathe, to leave space, would mean losing the memory entirely. Sometimes we need that continuous flow to hold onto what’s slipping away.

The Weight of Absence
Absence has its own gravity. Just as a physical void creates pull, emptiness in poetry draws both eye and emotion into its depths. In the spaces between stanzas, in the white expanse around solitary words, we feel that inexorable draw:

little faces bright
running feet 
piercing laughter
               lost to time
               only their ghosts remain
               here in the realm between.

Each line carries both presence and absence—what was, what is, what might have been. The white space around these words holds all the things we can’t quite say, all the memories that slip through our fingers like attic dust.

Finding Our Way Through Space
Sometimes we need the gaps, the pauses, the empty spaces on the page. Just as we need moments of silence to process grief, poetry needs white space to free the meaning and allow it to emerge:

Yet here they dwell
in the realm
               between
their paths
               unseen
here in the dusty attic

Each gap between lines is a held breath. Each indent is a step back in time. Each blank space is a door left open for readers to walk through with their own story, their own loss, their own understanding.

Because that’s what poetry does best—it creates spaces where multiple truths can exist simultaneously. Where presence and absence dance together. Where what’s left unsaid speaks just as loudly as what’s written down.

And sometimes, in those carefully crafted spaces between words, we find something unexpected: a place where loss and memory meet, where absence becomes its own kind of presence, where silence itself begins to sing.