At my "Living with Loss" class last night, we were given this assignment:

It is no accident that the world's greatest and best loved poems are of love and death. Both the highs and the lows of our emotional lives are felt passionately whenever we become intimately connected or we lose what we most dearly love.

Write your own poem about loss. Do not concern yourself with rhyme or meter. The best poetry is often eloquent prose.

The first line of your poem is:

Grief came knocking at my door one day...

Here's mine:

Grief came knocking at my door one day.
I didn't want to let it in, but it entered anyway.
It stayed long past its welcome.
It used up all my clean sheets and towels.
It ate all my food and drank all my wine.
It watched bad TV programs way into the night,
And listened to music so loud that I could not hear myself think.
When friends came to visit, they could not enter because my house was already full.