Death poems
/ page 288 of 560 /
Paradise Lost: Book I
© Patrick Kavanagh
So spake th' apostate Angel, though in pain,
Vaunting aloud, but rack'd with deep despair.
And him thus answer'd soon his bold compeer:
Paradise Lost: Book VII (1674)
© Patrick Kavanagh
DEscend from Heav'n Urania, by that name
If rightly thou art call'd, whose Voice divine
The Chimney Sweeper: A little black thing among the snow
© William Blake
A little black thing among the snow,
Crying "weep! 'weep!" in notes of woe!
"Where are thy father and mother? say?"
"They are both gone up to the church to pray.
The Amen Stone
© John Wesley
On my desk there is a stone with the word “Amen” on it,
a triangular fragment of stone from a Jewish graveyard destroyed
Photo of Miles Davis at Lennies-on-the-Turnpike, 1968
© Cornelius Eady
New York grows
Slimmer
In his absence.
I suppose
Shapes
© Ruth Stone
In the longer view it doesnt matter.
However, its that having lived, it matters.
The Asians Dying
© William Stanley Merwin
Rain falls into the open eyes of the dead
Again again with its pointless sound
When the moon finds them they are the color of everything
At the Grave of My Guardian Angel: St. Louis Cemetery, New Orleans
© Larry Levis
I should rush out to my office & eat a small, freckled apple leftover
From 1970 & entirely wizened & rotted by sunlight now,
Then lay my head on my desk & dream again of horses grazing, riderless & still saddled,
Under the smog of the freeway cloverleaf & within earshot of the music waltzing with itself out
Of the topless bars & laundromats of East L.A.
Idea LXI
© Michael Drayton
Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part.
Nay, I have done, you get no more of me;
Advice to a Prophet
© Lola Ridge
When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,
Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,
Not proclaiming our fall but begging us
In God’s name to have self-pity,
Lincoln
© Delmore Schwartz
Manic-depressive Lincoln, national hero!
How just and true that this great nation, being conceived
In liberty by fugitives should find
—Strange ways and plays of monstrous History—
This Hamlet-type to be the President—
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (text of 1834)
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
How a Ship having passed the Line was driven by storms to the cold Country towards the South Pole; and how from thence she made her course to the tropical Latitude of the Great Pacific Ocean; and of the strange things that befell; and in what manner the Ancyent Marinere came back to his own Country.
PART I
It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
'By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?
Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
© André Breton
The child is father of the man;
And I could wish my days to be
The Book of Hours
© Boris Pasternak
Like the blue angels of the nativity, the museum patrons
hover around the art historian, who has arrived frazzled
Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl
© John Greenleaf Whittier
To the Memory of the Household It Describes
This Poem is Dedicated by the Author
The Waste Carpet
© William Matthews
O California, sportswear
and defense contracts, gasses that induce
deference, high school girls
with their own cars, we wanted
to love you without pain.
I know that He exists. (365)
© Emily Dickinson
I know that He exists.
Somewhere – in silence –
He has hid his rare life
From our gross eyes.
Sisters in Arms
© Elizabeth Daryush
Keys jingle in the door ajar threatening
whatever is coming belongs here
I reach for your sweetness
but silence explodes like a pregnant belly
into my face
a vomit of nevers.
