Love poems
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At The Executed Murderer's Grave
© James Wright
6.
Staring politely, they will not mark my face
From any murderer's, buried in this place.
Why should they? We are nothing but a man.
Sleep Flies Me
© Robert Fuller Murray
Sleep flies me like a lover
Too eagerly pursued,
Or like a bird to cover
Within some distant wood,
Where thickest boughs roof over
Her secret solitude.
Distant Voices
© Dora Sigerson Shorter
And dusky faces passed and woke
The echoes with the words they spoke
The same old tales as other folk.
A truce to roaming! Never more
I'll leave the home I loved of yore.
But strangers meet me at the door.
Gentlmen-Rankers
© Rudyard Kipling
To the legion of the lost ones, to the cohort of the damned,
To my brethren in their sorrow overseas,
Sings a gentleman of England cleanly bred, machinely crammed,
And a trooper of the Empress, if you please.
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
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!
To Autum
© William Blake
O Autumn, laden with fruit, and stain'd
With the blood of the grape, pass not, but sit
Beneath my shady roof; there thou may'st rest,
And tune thy jolly voice to my fresh pipe,
And all the daughters of the year shall dance!
Sing now the lusty song of fruits and flowers.
Distant Authors
© Mary Colborne-Veel
Dear books! and each the living soul,
Our hearts aver, of men unseen,
Whose power to strengthen, charm, control,
Surmounts all earth's green miles between.
Snow Maiden
© Alexander Blok
She hailed from a very distant country,
Nocturnal child of ancient times;
She had no kin to greet her entry
Not even skies with a welcome shine.
Follow Me 'ome
© Rudyard Kipling
There was no one like 'im, 'Orse or Foot,
Nor any o' the Guns I knew;
An' because it was so, why, o' course 'e went an' died,
Which is just what the best men do.
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 Fires
© Rudyard Kipling
Men make them fires on the hearth
Each under his roof-tree,
And the Four Winds that rule the earth
They blow the smoke to me.
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 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.
Aeneas At Washington
© Allen Tate
(To the reduction of uncitied littorals
We brought chiefly the vigor of prophecy,
Our hunger breeding calculation
And fixed triumphs)
