Black & Blue: On Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms, Starshine Road, and How We Wear Grief

A guest blog post by Tierney Boyle, Perugia’s spring 2025 intern

When I think of death, I think of its clockwork performance of tradition. In perhaps the ideal circumstance, the dead would be dressed for their burial in a nice outfit pulled from the depths of their closet that was last worn at a wedding or holiday party. Ideally, they would look how you last saw them. Realistically, they never do. You think about how they would have worn their favorite clothes instead of a suit, a striped tie instead of a solid one. They would not have worn lipstick, but you can’t just reach into the casket and smudge it from their lips. But in some ways you can, even after the casket has been closed and everyone has gone home for the evening. We do it in the words we write after the fact. Through poetry, we paint the dead’s final portraits in hyper-realistic honesty that then allows us to intertwine our own experience with their final moments.

It goes without saying that poetry is a medium for dealing with grief. This poetry can exist in the conversations we have with friends and family when we share endearing stories about the ones we have lost. It can exist in broken and unfinished phrases in the notes apps on our phones. In the visits to the cemetery or on a fireplace mantle. For many Perugia poets, it exists in their published works. Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms, Perugia’s 2024 title by Joan Kwon Glass, features a plethora of pieces that exhume a raw and unsung experience with grief. One poem from this collection, “Last Communion,” displays the dichotomy between being respectful of the dead and being dishonest about who they really were:

from “Last Communion”

I like to read between the lines of obituaries, try
to guess what their family members left out on purpose.
You can tell a lot by what isn’t there. For example,
vague obit of healthy teenager: death by overdose,
fifty-year-old mom who was a brave warrior: breast cancer, 
thirty-year-old male, donations to NAMI in lieu of flowers: suicide.

Like the speaker in this poem, I have wondered how important it was to know what caused the death of a loved one. Would it change my opinion of them? Would it even change their character? It would not bring them back, so tradition forces us to be respectful to the very end. I would argue it would bring closure to many, knowing the circumstances surrounding a death. It is just as important to know that, despite the peace that death brings, there was struggle beforehand, and that struggle has been felt by many before them. Perhaps that struggle made them stoic, or senile. On the other hand, maybe they did not struggle. Maybe they were ready. Tradition boils a sea of maybes into the air that we continue to breathe even years after the funeral.

The following poem from Glass’s book entitled “Fairytale” is a wishful statement addressed to her sister Julia:

from “Fairy Tale”

In this version, I bury you in your favorite Halloween costume, the 
Cheshire Cat one, with a grin painted on where your mouth is. I adorn 
your body with every piece of jewelry you own instead of saving it for 
your daughter like you ask.

Like Glass, I wish to have buried my grandmother in the clothing that most represented her. If I could, I would have buried my grandma with her sun hat, sunglasses atop her head, and her blue Vero Beach tee shirt, instead of the matching white blouse and slacks. I would have lined the inside of the casket with seashells, unwashed of sand and salt. Instead, I can bury her with these things in my writing. I also bury her with my memories of her at the beach and her late night shifts at the hospital. I can bury her with her lung condition, and the life she had before it. I can be honest about who she was outside of the casket, as Glass has done for her sister in her Perugia collection.

Along the next stretch on this highway of grief poems, we come to “Shoe Tree (a poem in twelve parts)” by L. I. Henley from her 2017 Perugia book Starshine Road. I still grapple with my interpretation of this specific poem, but one part rings clear as a bell for me. Henley creatively uses actual pairs of shoes draped on a tamarisk tree to symbolize not only those that have passed by or passed on but the presence they leave through the passage of time. In part four of the poem, Henley references this phenomena:

from “Shoe Tree (a poem in twelve parts)”

4

The granny knot is to blame
for fallen shoes.
Of course, no one sets out to make
a failed knot, they think they’ve got
the usual reef,
saying to themselves the school-yard chant
right over left, then left over right.

We want our shoes to stay
where we’ve flung them, we want them
to sing from the highest branch,
want them to suspend like birds
with leather chests
riding a boundless current.

Shoe tree, what do you feel

when the knots begin
to loosen?

What do you feel about us—our skills, mistakes,
strength?

Judge by how hard
we throw.

Even while this part is written from the perspective of one of the individuals who once wore or held a pair of shoes, there is a shared identity that I am sensing from both the tree and the shoes. The tree, rooted in its place, sees all but doesn’t move. It moves through time but is also in a somewhat permanent form. It is similar to those who have passed on, remaining how they were last seen by loved ones. The discarded shoes, when they are empty, hold the same ghostly permanence as the rooted tree, and we are left to remember who had once inhabited the shoes. In life, shoes are only able to move from their place when there are feet to move them, but maybe this example from this memorial tree isn’t just an illustration of the permanence of death. Maybe those loosened laces also show that there can be movement, even after someone has passed on. The last four lines have left me wondering whether tradition gets in the way of this connection between the dead in the living. Does it impact the way we remember them?

Reading and writing poetry helps us to imagine our way through the hardest parts of living, including death. This idea has helped me recognize the power of my own voice as a poet. I chose to wear black to my grandmother’s funeral because it symbolized death, but I wish I wore bright blue because that is the color I often remember her wearing, and I loved her. It was a choice I made, despite being a poet, and I regret it to this day. However, my grandmother would never have wanted me to feel regret for our final interactions. And in a way there is no “final,” because I can go looking for her in my poetry. Maybe I’ll find her on the side of the highway as a tree, and my siblings and I will stop to sit below her branches, wearing blue.

Author bio

Hailing from Easthampton, MA, Tierney Boyle is a college junior pursuing her second bachelor’s degree in English from Westfield State University. She received her first from Emerson College in 2023 and went back to school to honor her true passion of writing. She recently received the Second Place George “Curt” Curtin Poetry Award for her poem, “Dirt Bites Back.” An active and dedicated member of Persona, Westfield State University’s student-run literary journal, she is in line to be the 2025-2026 Editor-in-Chief. Outside of the classroom, she is an avid cat lover and coffee drinker.