My name is Podrigotuma and I have such respect for sad poetry because there are sad things

that happen in our lives.

And sadness can be a very difficult thing to face.

Perhaps we might reject it or try to change it, but a poem that is arrived at the stage

where it can look at sadness and say, yeah, here it is.

Perhaps you use some beautiful language to describe it, to just let it be.

In a certain sense that saying, sadness isn't everything, but it's in this poem in order

for me to be able to acknowledge it, listen to its truths and speak back to it too.

Seasonal Without Spring, Autumn by Andrei Sherpa.

When I woke for school the next day, the sky was uniform, unless the infinite with the

confusion of autumn and my father, as he became distant with disease, the way a boy falls

beneath the ice before the men that cannot save him, the cold like a forever on his lips.

Soon he was never up before us and we jump on the bed, wake up, wake up and my sister's

hair was still in curls then and my favorite photograph still hung.

My father's back to us leading a bicycle of hill.

At the top the roads vanish and turn.

The leaves lent yellow and a frozen sprint of light and there the forward motion.

The nights I laid in the crutch of my parents' doorway and dreamt awake, listened like a field

of snow.

I heard no answer.

Even sleepless, slept in my own arms beneath the window to the teacher's blank and low.

Mrs. Belmont's lesson on Eden that year.

...