Honey on the Tongue of Time

Grief tastes like honey
Sticky between the ribs,
slow-burning, gold-drunken,
a pulse in the molars,
a sweetness that won’t leave.

Time is a jar
you can’t close
and every memory drips
through the cracks of your fingers—
lick it, let it burn,
let it coat your throat
with the weight of what was.

Sometimes the honey melts
and sunlight pours like applause
across your kitchen counter,
and you remember
you can rise
even if it’s crooked,
even if it’s trembling,
even if your hands
still carry the taste of gold and ash.

Grief is not a body to bury
It is a liquid cathedral
you walk through barefoot,
floor sticky, light fractured,
stained-glass moments
you can taste in your mouth.

The floors remember you
before you remember them
and the walls hum
a tune you can’t hum back.

Immortality is in the mouth,
in the hands,
in the spine that refuses to fold,
in the small acts
of keeping yourself
even while losing everything.

Sip,
swallow,
stay.

This poem won the Monthly Poetry Prize for September! Here are some of journal editor Rob Taylor's thoughts on the poem:

Some poems take on new subjects, opening us to experiences that have never touched us directly. Others take universal themes and manage—through deep attention to image and the subtleties of human emotion—to show us anew our supposedly-known worlds. They make us feel again what we thought we had already fully felt. This is what Emily Turner does with grief in "Honey on the Tongue of Time." I lost my mother last year, and yes, I can feel it: grief in my ribs, my mouth. Thick and sticky and sometimes bitterly sweet. Thank you, Emily, for the gift of that awareness.

A selfie of a teenage girl with long hair pulled half back, wearing a white shirt and beige cardigan.

Emily Turner

Grade: 12 / CEGEP I
Francis Libermann Secondary School
Scarborough, ON

“I wrote this poem on the anniversary of my grandmother’s passing. To me, despite all the time that passes by, grief is something that never quite goes away. It lingers, in the quiet moments, in the loud moments, in the sad moments, and even in the happy moments. But rather than letting it stay on our tongue, we need to take it all in in order to move forward. Grief is the byproduct of love. ”

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