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Grief Is a Candle, Quiet Soul

--a poem for the ones who keep trembling in the dark

By Summer2224

Poem Description: This poem was born from grief. I started writing it after my grandma passed last year -- and because I’ve always loved Edgar Allan Poe’s darkness and Emily Dickinson’s way of cutting straight to the soul, I spent over a year quietly studying both of them. For the longest time this piece stayed hidden in a notes app, something I wasn’t sure I’d ever share.

But Tumblr feels like the place where small stories, soft confessions, and creative experiments are allowed to breathe… so this is me letting it.

I hope this poem reaches anyone who’s moving through loss -- or has carried it for a long time. If you read my story I'm Lost Without You on Wattpad, you know how deeply my grandmother shaped me. Losing her has been one of the hardest parts of my life… and in the last year, I’ve also lost both of my remaining grandparents. One by one, a year apart, until there were none left.

With my grandfather’s wake coming up this weekend, it feels right to finally share this. Maybe it finds someone who needs it. Maybe it reminds you that you’re not alone in what you’re feeling.

If this sits with you -- even quietly, even painfully -- I hope it also offers a little warmth.

Like a candle after the flame

Written July 3rd 2024—August 14th 2025

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Quiet soul, come sit beside me; I have kept a little flame,

not to frighten you with shadows, not to call you by your name,

but to show you something gentle in the grief you try to hide--

a small and aching candle that you carry deep inside.

It flickers when you’re laughing, it trembles when you speak,

it burns with softer embers on the days you feel most weak.

Yet still you hold it carefully, as though the world might see

the way the melted wax has shaped the contours of your memory.

Quiet soul, you fear the darkness, though you walk it every night;

and you think your tears are failures, though they shimmer in the light.

You have mastered every silence, every moment you withdrew,

but grief is not a flaw, my love -- it’s the most human part of you.

It is the wax that stays warm long after flame is gone,

the part that keeps you reaching though you know you must move on.

It whispers like a lover you remember in your bones,

the echo of a heartbeat in a house that once was home.

And quiet soul, I see you -- in the rooms you never show,

tracing shadows on the floorboards like the ones from long ago.

Your hands still lift to open doors that no one walks through now,

and you keep asking empty air the questions grief won’t answer how.

You press your thumb to cooled wax just to prove that warmth was real;

you hope that touching memory might remind you how to feel.

But love, you’re not forgetting -- you’re surviving what you lost.

You’re learning how to bear a flame that knows the price of frost.

Quiet soul, come closer -- there is darkness you’ve outgrown,

and I know you think you wander through this landscape all alone.

But every soul who’s ever loved has carried this same light,

this candle made of memory, this sorrow shaped by night.

It’s the vow that lingers softly long after breath has fled,

the echo of a promise spoken gently by the dead.

It is absence wearing footprints, it is longing dressed as pain,

it is reaching for a voice you know you’ll never hear again.

Yet grief, dear quiet soul, is not a tempest meant to break you;

it’s a rhythm meant to wake you

to the depth of what was true.

It’s the shadow grief will drape you in until you learn its weight,

and the softness it will grant you when you stop to contemplate--

that even love that’s vanished leaves a pulse beneath your skin,

and loss is but the doorway where remembrance wanders in.

Quiet soul, you tremble as you listen for the spark

of the life you had before all of this quiet turned to dark.

And I know you curse the longing, and the nights you couldn’t sleep,

and the dreams that hold your heartbeat in a well so dark and deep.

But grief is not the monster, love -- it’s merely what remains

when your heart has lived through something that rewrites it with its stains.

It’s the ink inside your ribcage that refuses to let go,

the letter left unopened because reading it feels slow.

Quiet soul, the candle’s small, but look at how it glows

it lights the empty corners that your broken heart still knows.

And every night you whisper to the shadows in your chest,

“I’m trying to remember, but I’m trying to rest.”

That’s grief -- a quiet bargain between hurting and release,

a prayer that asks for mercy while you’re learning how to heal in pieces.

A heartbeat made of wax and flame, a trembling, holy mark

that proves you loved so fiercely it still echoes in the dark.

Quiet soul, you think you’re fragile, but I promise you are not;

even sorrow can’t unmake the tender strength your heart has wrought.

You walk through haunted hallways with your candle and your fear,

yet still you take another step -- and love, you’re still here.

Still breathing.

Still standing.

Still aching.

Still you.

And grief, for all its shadows, has not stolen what is true.

It has only carved you deeper in the places where you feel,

given shape to all the tenderness your hurting couldn’t heal.

It has taught you this.. that loving means accepting all you keep,

and the warmth in cooled wax is the memory you steep.

So quiet soul, don’t run from it -- let candlelight remain;

let it soften all the jagged edges sharpened by your pain.

For grief is but the proof of love, the echo of its fire,

the poetry of longing sewn with threads of pure desire.

I know you wish the flame were back, the wick unburned, the past undone--

but candles aren’t rewritten once the burning has begun.

Instead they leave you softened, melted, changed by what you’ve known,

a vessel carved by tenderness that grief has overgrown.

Quiet soul, your light is different now -- but oh, how it still glows.

And though the world will tell you healing happens without throes,

I know the truth you carry in the chambers of your chest:

grief is not forgetting -- grief is love that’s laid to rest.

So when your hands are shaking and your breath is barely whole,

sit with me beside the candle, you soft and sacred soul.

Touch the wax that still remembers what the flame once used to be,

and know that in your trembling, you are safe to grieve with me.

Quiet soul, you’re not alone.

Your sorrow has a place.

Your tears can fall like poetry and still be met with grace.

And if the dark surrounds you, let this truth be what you hold

grief is just the candle’s warmth --

and you, my love,

are gold.

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