Elegy Poems
Duino Elegies: The First Elegy
by Rainer Maria Rilke
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'
hierarchies? and even if one of them suddenly
pressed me against his heart, I would perish
in the embrace of his stronger existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
which we are barely able to endure and are awed
because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Each single angel is terrifying.
And so I force myself, swallow and hold back
the surging call of my dark sobbing.
......
Elegy
by Dylan Thomas
Too proud to die; broken and blind he died
The darkest way, and did not turn away,
A cold kind man brave in his narrow pride
On that darkest day, Oh, forever may
He lie lightly, at last, on the last, crossed
Hill, under the grass, in love, and there grow
Young among the long flocks, and never lie lost
Or still all the numberless days of his death, though
......
Elegy to the Fallen
by Earl Esguerra
The baleful crows of nightingales
sound the lamentation of one’s final throes.
The skies cry for the thoughts and memories you’ve left behind,
the beautiful flowers shrivel up in response; petals once alluring now lifeless
Never would one think that in your passing
brings such a feeling of melancholy and longing.
The cries of toiling people comes with you in your rest,
Beneath the murky ground – amidst the vast and desolate plains
until the echoes of life leave their bodies.
Preface
by Wilfred Owen
This book is not about heroes. English Poetry is not yet fit to speak
of them. Nor is it about deeds or lands, nor anything about glory, honour,
dominion or power,
except War.
Above all, this book is not concerned with Poetry.
The subject of it is War, and the pity of War.
The Poetry is in the pity.
Yet these elegies are not to this generation,
This is in no sense consolatory.
......
A Small Elegy
by Jirí Orten
My friends have left. Far away, my darling is asleep.
Outside, it's as dark as pitch.
I'm saying words to myself, words that are white
in the lamplight and when I'm half-asleep I begin
to think about my mother. Autumnal recollection.
Really, under the cover of winter, it's as if I know
everything---even what my mother is doing now.
She's at home in the kitchen. She has a small child's stove
toward which the wooden rocking horse can trot,
she has a small child's stove, the sort nobody uses today, but
......
Elegy to the Fallen
by Earl Esguerra
The baleful crows of nightingales
sound the lamentation of one’s final throes.
The skies cry for the thoughts and memories you’ve left behind,
the beautiful flowers shrivel up in response; petals once alluring now lifeless
Never would one think that in your passing
brings such a feeling of melancholy and longing.
The cries of toiling people comes with you in your rest,
Beneath the murky ground – amidst the vast and desolate plains
until the echoes of life leave their bodies.
Mama's Son
by Graham Ereks
'I'll be back soonest', he said to mama blithely,
Nescient of the state's cannibalistic hostility.
How can mama take this inhumanity likely?
Tear-drops every day, thanks to brutality.
Bloodthirsty men-in-black, liveried omnipresent
Ambassadors of anarchy, never at all decent.
Haranguers of licitness, promoters of inequity,
Vampires they are,for they are an insignia of nonentity.
......
A Drunkard's Tears
by Graham Ereks
Half-clad I pittled in the grown-old day,
Body boozed by a gazillion boozes.
I sauntered hither and thither zigzag
My destination I knew not, for my vision
Had been boozed and boozed.
I sauntered scalarly gibbering to my booze;
Oh what a feeling it was!
I came by a canis manacled and together we
Confabulated heart-to-heart.
......
The Fern
by Rosa Jamali
The Fern
A Poem by Rosa Jamali
Translated from original Persian to English by the Author
I was a seven-story being, covered in scarce species of a plant
And it was a funeral ceremony
and I was the only single mourner
First I grabbed a gemstone from this very soil,
And then sealed and knocked it over my forehead
I returned and had a glance at my homeland again and I wept.
......
The Entombment
by Graham Ereks
A woman of virtue
Is no more;
A woman loved by all.
A wife and, doubtless,
A great mother.
Surreptitiously death’s taken
Her away from us.
Your living body I reminisce,
Not your cadaver.
......
