I wish to speak of our Grief Tending Ritual, held at the Great Salt Lake just before Halloween this year. Seven people came. There was a rock concert going on. We performed the ritual on the salt flats just north of the overflow parking. Something happened in our doing it together. Amy Brunvand spoke mythic words, a poem she'd written in response to her experience of the Grief Tending Ritual last spring. I offer her poem here, with gratitude.

Grief Tending Ritual, Great Salt Lake

Rato ramro, guliyo mitho  — Nepali proverb

Grief flies in mated pairs
Gulls crying loneliness

Salt-crusted ripples
Drought traced in sand

Salt stiffened feathers
Aligned by receding water

Salt desiccated mummy
With the redspot beak of a gull

Ragged mountains floating
On a salty mirage of tears

Red sunset sky, red water,
Red, red broken grief

Beating heartsong drum
Bright shining as the air

Grief for evaporation
Flat salt-poisoned mud

Grief for shorebirds
Their marshes and rivers

Grief for freeway taillights,
Blinking smokestack beacons

Grief for the distant glow
Electric brightlight city

Grief for the red-eye drone
With its camera panopticon

Grief for ourselves
Followed always by the dead

Tears for the world of wounds
Caught in a glass bowl

Caught in sighing waves
Caught in a drybone rattle

Caught in the sugar sweet
Red mackerel clouded sky

 Caught in damp footprints
People, animals, birds

Walking to the water’s edge
To pour out their tears

Into the Great Basin of grief
That holds all which flows to it

Into salt water that releases
Only things that vaporize or fly.

— Amy Brunvand