Death poems
/ page 311 of 560 /
from The Congo: Section 1
© Roald Dahl
I. THEIR BASIC SAVAGERY
Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room,
The Crowing of the Red Cock
© Emma Lazarus
Across the Eastern sky has glowed
The flicker of a blood-red dawn,
Once more the clarion cock has crowed,
Once more the sword of Christ is drawn.
A million burning rooftrees light
The world-wide path of Israel's flight.
Three Women
© Wilcox Ella Wheeler
My love is young, so young;
Young is her cheek, and her throat,
And life is a song to be sung
With love the word for each note.
The Prediction
© Mark Strand
That night the moon drifted over the pond,
turning the water to milk, and under
the boughs of the trees, the blue trees,
a young woman walked, and for an instant
The Author
© Charles Churchill
Accursed the man, whom Fate ordains, in spite,
And cruel parents teach, to read and write!
All For The Cause
© William Morris
Hear a word, a word in season,
for the day is drawing nigh,
When the Cause shall call upon us,
some to live, and some to die!
At Melville’s Tomb
© Hart Crane
Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.
A Map to the Next World
© Joy Harjo
for Desiray Kierra Chee
In the last days of the fourth world I wished to make a map for
those who would climb through the hole in the sky.
To a Wren on Calvary
© Larry Levis
And all later luxuries—the half-dressed neighbor couple
Shouting insults at each other just beyond
Her bra on a cluttered windowsill, then ceasing it when
A door was slammed to emphasize, like trouble,
A Sweet Contention Between Love, His Mistress, And Beauty
© Nicholas Breton
Love and my mistress were at strife
Who had the greatest power on me:
Betwixt them both, oh, what a life!
Nay, what a death is this to be!
To... On the Death of Her Sister
© Samuel Rogers
Ah! little thought she, when, with wild delight
By many a torrent's shining track she flew,
When mountain-glens and caverns full of night
O'er her young mind divine enchantment threw,
Turning Forty
© Jonathan Galassi
The barroom mirror lit up with our wives
has faded to a loaded-to-the-gills
Japanese subcompact, little lives
asleep behind us, heading for the hills
Debtor’s Prison Road
© Heather McHugh
tick fitfully, they always have
appointments. Punctual, six-sharp,
they are David's; they have lodged in his
death tent, have stuck in his mud sleep. Bad luck
Lines On The Death Of S. Oliver Torrey
© John Greenleaf Whittier
SECRETARY OF THE BOSTON YOUNG MEN'S ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY.
Gone before us, O our brother,
In Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII: [Prelude]
© Alfred Tennyson
Strong Son of God, immortal Love,
Whom we, that have not seen thy face,
By faith, and faith alone, embrace,
Believing where we cannot prove;
Sic Semper Liberatoribus!
© Emma Lazarus
As one who feels the breathless nightmare grip
His heart-strings, and through visioned horrors fares,
Invisible Dreams
© Toi Derricotte
La poesie vit d’insomnie perpetuelle
—René Char
There’s a sickness in me. During
the night I wake up & it’s brought
The Bungalows
© John Ashbery
Impatient as we were for all of them to join us,
The land had not yet risen into view: gulls had swept the gray steel towers away
So that it profited less to go searching, away over the humming earth
Than to stay in immediate relation to these other things—boxes, store parts, whatever you wanted to call them—
Whose installedness was the price of further revolutions, so you knew this combat was the last.
And still the relationship waxed, billowed like scenery on the breeze.
