I did this one for a national poetry comp. Loved it. Mostly because I can relate. I had a friend who called around 10pm, scared witless. Her dad had gone out to get her sister and hadn't come back. We told her to call around 10:30 if he still wasn't back. She called, so my dad went to try and go find her dad and sister. He found him in his car. The sister was still inside the track and field house. he called home at 12:37. The first words out of his mouth were "He died." He was just as much of a father to me as my own dad was. He came to soccer games and band concerts and bbqs. It didn't matter that we weren't related.

So this makes sense to me, though maybe if you've never lost someone, seeing something "sweet" might not makes sense. To me, it means that even though life might suck right now, there's still something good somewhere. It won't change things. World peace won't suddenly come, and cancer won't be cured, but it could make it so it doesn't hurt so much. It'll help you find your feet again until you can stand on your own. When you don't need the crutches anymore, it'll leave again. But it'll leave on good terms. I dunno. Does that make sense?

Sweetness
By Stephen Dunn

Just when it has seemed I couldn’t bear
one more friend
waking with a tumor, one more maniac

with a perfect reason, often a sweetness
has come
and changed nothing in the world

except the way I stumbled through it,
for a while lost
in the ignorance of loving

someone or something, the world shrunk
to mouth-size,
hand-size, and never seeming small.

I acknowledge there is no sweetness
that doesn’t leave a stain,
no sweetness that’s ever sufficiently sweet ....

Tonight a friend called to say his lover
was killed in a car
he was driving. His voice was low

and guttural, he repeated what he needed
to repeat, and I repeated
the one or two words we have for such grief

until we were speaking only in tones.
Often a sweetness comes
as if on loan, stays just long enough

to make sense of what it means to be alive,
then returns to its dark
source. As for me, I don’t care

where it’s been, or what bitter road
it’s traveled
to come so far, to taste so good.