Life poems
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Moonflowers by Karma Larsen: American Life in Poetry #8 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of poems have been written to express the grief of losing a parent. Many of the most telling of these attach the sense of loss to some object, some personal thing left behind, as in this elegy to her mother by a Nebraskan, Karma Larsen:
Moonflowers
Monologue Of A Commercial Fisherman
© Alan Dugan
If you work a body of water and a body of woman
you can take fish out of one and children out of the other
Remembrance
© John Greenleaf Whittier
Friend of mine! whose lot was cast
With me in the distant past;
Where, like shadows flitting fast,
The Galley-Slave
© Rudyard Kipling
Oh gallant was our galley from her caren steering-wheel
To her figurehead of silver and her beak of hammered steel;
The leg-bar chafed the ankle and we gasped for cooler air,
But no galley on the waters with our galley could compare!
Four-Feet
© Rudyard Kipling
"THE WOMAN IN HIS LIFE"
I have done mostly what most men do,
And pushed it out of my mind;
But I can't forget, if I wanted to,
Four-Feet trotting behind.
For All We Have And Are
© Rudyard Kipling
For all we have and are,
For all our children's fate,
Stand up and take the war.
The Hun is at the gate!
Juana
© Alfred de Musset
Again I see you, ah my queen,
Of all my old loves that have been,
The first love, and the tenderest;
Do you remember or forget -
Ah me, for I remember yet -
How the last summer days were blest?
The First Chantey
© Rudyard Kipling
Mine was the woman to me, darkling I found her:
Haling her dumb from the camp, held her and bound her.
Hot rose her tribe on our track ere I had proved her;
Hearing her laugh in the gloom, greatly I loved her.
And Yet :
© Arthur Henry Adams
THEY drew him from the darkened room,
Where, swooning in a peace profound,
Beneath a heavy fragrance drowned
Her grey form glimmered in the gloom.
The Female of the Species
© Rudyard Kipling
When the Himalayan peasant meets the he-bear in his pride,
He shouts to scare the monster, who will often turn aside.
But the she-bear thus accosted rends the peasant tooth and nail.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
Eudoxia. Third Picture
© Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
O SILENT my sister, who stands by my side at the shore,
Back gazing with me on those waves which we mortals call years,
That rose, grew, and threatened, and climaxed, and broke, and were o'er,
While we still sit watching and watching, our cheeks free from tears--
O sister, with looks so familiar, yet strange, flitting by,
Say, say, hast thou been to those dead years as faithful as I?
The Fairies' Siege
© Rudyard Kipling
I have been given my charge to keep--
Well have I kept the same!
Playing with strife for the most of my life,
But this is a different game.
The Fabulists
© Rudyard Kipling
When all the world would keep a matter hid,
Since Truth is seldom Friend to any crowd,
Men write in Fable, as old AEsop did,
Jesting at that which none will name aloud.
And this they needs must do, or it will fall
Unless they please they are not heard at all.
The Explanation
© Rudyard Kipling
Love and Death once ceased their strife
At the Tavern of Man's Life.
Called for wine, and threw -- alas! --
Each his quiver on the grass.
Since There Is No Escape
© Sara Teasdale
SINCE there is no escape, since at the end
My body will be utterly destroyed,
Evarra And His Gods
© Rudyard Kipling
Read here:
This is the story of Evarra -- man --
Maker of Gods in lands beyond the sea.
Because the city gave him of her gold,
Jerusalem Delivered - Book 02 - part 05
© Torquato Tasso
XLVI
"Sir King," quoth she, "my name Clorinda hight,
En-Dor
© Rudyard Kipling
Whispers shall comfort us out of the dark--
Hands--ah God!--that we knew!
Visions .and voices --look and hark!--
Shall prove that the tale is true,
An that those who have passed to the further shore
May' be hailed--at a price--on the road to En-dor.
Myra
© Fulke Greville
I, with whose colours Myra dress'd her head,
I, that ware posies of her own hand-making,
I, that mine own name in the chimneys read
By Myra finely wrought ere I was waking:
Must I look on, in hope time coming may
With change bring back my turn again to play?
