Katharsis

When we’d turned away from the maudlin guests
at the family reunion, my companion said:
“I don’t approve of this much drinking.
They will wake up tomorrow morning
and feel undignified, embarrassed. This isn’t
catharsis, though I know you disagree.”

All I could do was shrug my shoulders. In the next room,
the old ladies drank their glasses down,
told their grief endlessly, like worry beads;
showed the wounds, the scars, the helplessness
they’d never shown even to each other
while their watchful husbands were alive.

 - Jacques Coetzee