Sing to Me and I Will Hear You - The Poems

My husband Francis died on January 3, 2010. During the previous three months and ten days after we learned he had bone cancer, we shared unforgettable experiences. I communicated many of these in my emails to family and friends, bringing them along with us during our passage into the unknown - through his hospice at home to his death. In September, 2010, I began rereading the letters I had begun writing in September, 2009. Then, two books of poetry given to me by a friend, sparked something new in my life. The books were Donald Hall s The Painted Bed and Without, in which he laments the death of his wife, Jane Kenyon, also a poet. Fresh from revisiting and reliving Francis and my experiences, and with the example of a grief-stricken poet to encourage me - poems started coming. The first one sets the scene: I was a nun and you, a priest.