Our Writing Group Survived Three Funerals
We kept the empty chairs and read their poems on their birthdays.
There are eleven chairs in Prue's front room and only eight of us left to sit in them.
Nobody is allowed to move the other three. Not the plumber, not Prue's grandchildren, not the new member who once, innocently, went to drag one over for his coat. Eight heads turned at the same time like something out of a horror film. He put it back. We explained later, over tea, and to his credit he did not run.
The group started in 2009 in the basement of the Northfield library, under a flickering tube light, with a sign-up sheet that said "Poetry Circle, all welcome, biscuits provided." Six strangers came. Denny, a retired train driver who wrote exclusively about birds. Prue, a widowed pharmacist with the handwriting of a Victorian schoolmistress. Salim, who ran the dry cleaner's and wrote in Urdu first, then translated aloud, apologizing for what he swore was lost. Marguerite, who never told us her age and wrote love poems that made grown adults look at the floor. Me, thirty-four then, recently divorced, sitting in on a dare from my sister. And a teenager called Bex who came for community service hours and stayed nineteen years.
We had one rule, invented by Denny at the second meeting: you must read something every month, and you may not apologize before you read. "The poem doesn't need a lawyer," he said. "It needs a voice."
For eight years that was the whole story. Biscuits, arguments about line breaks, Salim's translations, Denny's herons and wagtails and one controversial year of owls. When the library cut its hours we moved to Prue's front room, and her eleven mismatched chairs became our fixed geography. You sat where you sat. Denny by the window, because of the bird feeder. Marguerite nearest the radiator. Everyone had a place the way a word has a place in a line.
Denny went first.
A heart attack in his garden in March 2017, between the feeder and the back door. At the funeral his daughter read one of his wagtail poems and half the crematorium heard, for the first time, that the quiet man from the trains had been a poet at all. Afterward she gave us his notebook. Forty years of birds.
We came back to Prue's the following month not knowing what a writing group does with a hole in it. Someone suggested a minute of silence. Prue said no. She put his notebook on his chair by the window, and she said the sentence I have thought about at least once a week ever since.
"A poem is the only place a voice keeps its body. He's not gone, he's in the second drawer, and on his birthday we will let him out."
So that became the ritual. On the twelfth of June, Denny's birthday, we read Denny. Not poems about him. His. Out loud, from the chair by the window, each of us taking one, doing our best flat Midlands vowels. The first year we cried. The second year we laughed at the owl period. By the third year it was simply what June meant.
Marguerite died in 2020, the bad spring, in a care home we were not allowed inside. That one nearly ended us. There had been no funeral to speak of, just a livestream that froze... and grief with no ceremony is grief with no handles, nothing to grip. We stopped meeting for five months and told ourselves it was circumstances...
It was not circumstances.
It was that walking into that room meant looking at the radiator chair.
Bex was the one who dragged us back. She turned up at each of our doors, masked, at a distance, holding photocopies of a love poem Marguerite had read in 2013, the one about her husband's hands and the church hall dance in 1962. "Her birthday is Thursday," Bex said. "You can grieve at home alone or you can grieve in the right chairs." We chose the chairs. We have not missed a month since.
I wrote almost nothing that year... and what I did write circled the thing without landing on it, poems about weather that were not about weather. It took me an embarrassingly long time to write about the grief instead of around it, and when I finally did, it was in Marguerite's honor, in her manner, no armor, straight at the heart. The group sat quiet for a moment when I finished. Salim said, "There. That one cost you something. That's how we know."
Salim himself went two years ago. Pancreatic, fast, with enough warning that he did something none of the rest of us had the nerve to do: he assigned his own birthday reading. He spent his last months translating his best Urdu poems into English properly, no apologies, and left them in a folder marked "For the circle. Read the marked ones. Skip the third one, it never worked." We read the third one anyway, every year. It works fine. He was just being Salim.
His funeral was enormous. The dry cleaning customers came, the mosque came, the library staff came. And here is the turn I did not see coming: four people from that funeral asked, in the weeks after, if they could join the group. They had heard his poems read aloud over his coffin and wanted, in their own words, whatever that was.
Grief did not shrink us. It recruited.
So now we are eight in a room built for eleven, plus three chairs that hold notebooks instead of people. The new members learned the ritual the way you learn any liturgy, by being present for it. In June we read birds. In April, love poems from 1962. In November, Salim, including the forbidden third poem, followed by the traditional argument about whether it works.
Bex, who is thirty-seven now, has started typing up the best of the departed's work so it doesn't live only in fading ink. Some of it she has shared on a community wall for poets, and last winter she put Denny's wagtails forward for one of those pages that gather writers nobody had heard yet. A retired train driver, published at last, eight years dead and gaining readers. His daughter framed the page.
People imagine a writing group is about writing.
It is about witness.
Anyone can write alone. What you cannot do alone is have someone remember your owl period, or keep your chair, or read you aloud on your birthday in a warm room while the biscuits go around.
Last month a new member, the coat man, read for the first time. Voice shaking, paper shaking, the whole orchestra of a first reading. Halfway through, out of pure nerves, he stopped... and started to say sorry.
Eight of us said "No apologies" in unison, and I swear the three empty chairs said it too.
He laughed... He started over. He read it right through to the end, the way we all will be read, someday, from a chair by a window, on a birthday, by whoever is left.
That's the deal. That was always the deal.
Biscuits provided.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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