Poem of the Week | November 09, 2026

Steve Lambert was born in Louisiana and grew up in Florida. His writing has appeared in Saw Palm, Tampa Review, Trampoline Poetry, Louisiana Literature, New World Writing, The Pinch, Porchlight: A Journal of Southern Literature, Broad River Review, Cortland Review, and many other places. In 2018, he won Emrys Journal’s Nancy Dew Taylor Poetry Prize for the poem “Serenade for Larkin.” Interviews with Lambert have appeared in print and on podcasts and radio. He is the author of three poetry collections and the book-length poem Dutch Ears (2025); the fiction collections The Patron Saint of Birds (2020) and Village Life and Other Stories (forthcoming, 2026); the novel Philisteens (2021); and the collaborative fiction text Mortality Birds, written with Timothy Dodd (2022). He lives in Florida.  

“Secretaries of Grief” by Steve Lambert is our Poem of the Week.

Title image: Corvux corone. Carrion-Crow. (1862-1873) by John Gould

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Secretaries of Grief

Crows grieve for other crows 
And for the dying and the yet  
To live and those who never will.  
Grief seeps in and out of them 
Like the cold and they grieve   
For other things as well. But they  
Know that grief is joy’s true  
Work and that no one goes to hell.  

***

Author’s Note:

I have a habit of using my notes application in my phone for depositing phrases and ideas that pop into my head or that I hear people say as I go about my day. I will open up the app at least once a week and see what’s in there. One day “secretaries of grief” was in there. I like birds. I particularly like Corvids. In Florida, where I live, crows are quite common. I remember reading somewhere that crows have funerals for their dead. The phrase “secretaries of grief” and this factoid about crows came together shortly after I opened my notes application. I added other words and phrases. I moved these words and phrases around on the page until they became this poem, which strikes me as a micro-fairy tale or nursery rhyme. That’s all I remember about the composition of this poem.