From Naja Marie Aidt's When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back

An excerpt from Danish poet Naja Marie Aidt's exploration of grief following the death of her son, When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back (Coffee House), is up at the Paris Review Daily. An excerpt of the excerpt:

You are the one hiding in the hood’s darkness. I thought intensely about you as I wrote those two poems. I saw you before me as I wrote them. I didn’t know why, I didn’t ask myself why, the poems came to me as something from you, something I could not understand. All I understood was that I obviously had written two poems about death, and that you in a way gave me the images—or that something associated with your being got me to write them. The sun, the rain, the snow. Your face turning questioningly toward mine.

I read the two poems out loud at your funeral. I realized that as early as when you were a year old, I received a sign in my dream that you would vanish from me. As early as when you were sixteen years old, I saw you hiding in death’s dark hood. That I had already predicted the eternity that would replace your life, the eternity I now live with, and which you are absorbed by. Just as I dreamed that you fell and hurt yourself shortly before you fell to your death from the fifth floor.

But images and signs cannot be interpreted before they’re played out in concrete events. You understand them only in retrospect. That’s why omens can only be expressed. As language, as poetry...

Read more at the Paris Review Daily.