Death poems
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Look Unto Me, And Be Ye Saved
© John Newton
As the serpent raised by Moses
Healed the burning serpent's bite;
In The Harbour: Auf Wiedersehen
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Until we meet again! That is the meaning
Of the familiar words, that men repeat
At parting in the street.
Ah yes, till then! but when death intervening
Rends us asunder, with what ceaseless pain
We wait for the Again!
The Choice (The American Spirit Speaks)
© Rudyard Kipling
To the Judge of Right and Wrong
With Whom fulfillment lies
Our purpose and our power belong,
Our faith and sacrifice.
If This Were All
© Edgar Albert Guest
If this were all of life we'll know,
If this brief space of breath
Bankers Are Just Like Anybody Else, Except Richer
© Ogden Nash
This is a song to celebrate banks,
Because they are full of money and you go into them and all
you hear is clinks and clanks,
Or maybe a sound like the wind in the trees on the hills,
The Obesion
© Craig Erick Chaffin
Hawaiians once believed
that mana was proportional to mass,
so royalty were encouraged to overeat,
confirming Newton's laws before they knew
Europeans thought it gauche
to serve Captain Cooke stew.
A Time to Weep
© Craig Erick Chaffin
I suppose you could call me heartless
as a dull anvil clanking in a sodden barn,
the damp wood too lazy to echo your pain;
and your limbs twisted like great roots,
Year's End
© Marilyn Hacker
Twice in my quickly disappearing forties
someone called while someone I loved and I were
making love to tell me another woman had died of cancer.
Scars on Paper
© Marilyn Hacker
An unwrapped icon, too potent to touch,
she freed my breasts from the camp Empire dress.
Now one of them's the shadow of a breast
with a lost object's half-life, with as much
Paragraphs from a Day-Book
© Marilyn Hacker
Cherry-ripe: dark sweet burlats, scarlet reverchons
firm-fleshed and tart in the mouth
bigarreaux, peach-and-white napoléons
as the harvest moves north
The Story of Sigurd the Volsung (excerpt)
© William Morris
"When thou hearest the fool rejoicing, and he saith, 'It is over and past,
And the wrong was better than right, and hate turns into love at the last,
And we strove for nothing at all, and the Gods are fallen asleep;
For so good is the world a-growing that the evil good shall reap:'
Then loosen thy sword in the scabbard and settle the helm on thine head,
For men betrayed are mighty, and great are the wrongfully dead.
The Nymph's Song to Hylas
© William Morris
I KNOW a little garden-close
Set thick with lily and red rose,
Where I would wander if I might
From dewy dawn to dewy night,
And have one with me wandering.
The Haystack in the Floods
© William Morris
Had she come all the way for this,
To part at last without a kiss?
Yea, had she borne the dirt and rain
That her own eyes might see him slain
Beside the haystack in the floods?
The Earthly Paradise: The Lady of the Land
© William Morris
The ArgumentA certain man having landed on an island in the Greek sea, found there a beautifuldamsel, whom he would fain have delivered from a strange & dreadful doom, butfailing herein, he died soon afterwards.
It happened once, some men of Italy
Midst the Greek Islands went a sea-roving,
And much good fortune had they on the sea:
The Doomed Ship
© William Morris
Thus, Sorrow, are we sitting side by side
Amid this welter of the grey despair,
Nor have we images of foul or fair
To vex, save of thy kissed face of a bride,
Thy scornful face of tears when I was tried,
And failed neath pain I was not made to bear.
The Chapel in Lyonesse
© William Morris
All day long and every day,
From Christmas-Eve to Whit-Sunday,
Within that Chapel-aisle I lay,
And no man came a-near.
Song VI: Cherish Life that Abideth
© William Morris
Love is enough: cherish life that abideth,
Lest ye die ere ye know him, and curse and misname him;
For who knows in what ruin of all hope he hideth,
On what wings of the terror of darkness he rideth?
And what is the joy of man's life that ye blame him
For his bliss grown a sword, and his rest grown a fire?
Song II: Have No Thought for Tomorrow
© William Morris
Love is enough: have no thought for to-morrow
If ye lie down this even in rest from your pain,
Ye who have paid for your bliss with great sorrow:
For as it was once so it shall be again.
Ye shall cry out for death as ye stretch forth in vain
Riding Together
© William Morris
For many, many days together
The wind blew steady from the East;
For many days hot grew the weather,
About the time of our Lady's Feast.
