Grief Poems
The Complaint Of Ceres
by Friedrich Schiller
Does pleasant spring return once more?
Does earth her happy youth regain?
Sweet suns green hills are shining o'er;
Soft brooklets burst their icy chain:
Upon the blue translucent river
Laughs down an all-unclouded day,
The winged west winds gently quiver,
The buds are bursting from the spray;
While birds are blithe on every tree;
The Oread from the mountain-shore
......
Roosters
by Elizabeth Bishop
At four o'clock
in the gun-metal blue dark
we hear the first crow of the first cock
just below
the gun-metal blue window
and immediately there is an echo
off in the distance,
then one from the backyard fence,
......
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.
......
For Grief
by John O'Donohue
When you lose someone you love,
Your life becomes strange,
The ground beneath you becomes fragile,
Your thoughts make your eyes unsure;
And some dead echo drags your voice down
Where words have no confidence
Your heart has grown heavy with loss;
And though this loss has wounded others too,
No one knows what has been taken from you
When the silence of absence deepens.
......
The Kitten And Falling Leaves
by William Wordsworth
THAT way look, my Infant, lo!
What a pretty baby-show!
See the kitten on the wall,
Sporting with the leaves that fall,
Withered leaves---one---two---and three---
From the lofty elder-tree!
Through the calm and frosty air
Of this morning bright and fair,
Eddying round and round they sink
Softly, slowly: one might think,
......
Lamentation
by Evangeline Rollman
What is wrong, my soul?
My being, why faintest?
I've succumbed to desire,
but now, you're trapped in fire.
Oh, my heart, why do you weep?
My bones, why do you break?
How long have I strived,
but no joy has ever arrived.
......
bookends of his frame
by Rikske Kessner
In memoriam, to the one biological dad, on his birthday
"bookends of his frame"
He drew his first breath in the shadow of iron—
June of forty-two, when the world was loud,
......
Elegy for my Father
by Grey Davenport
Why could I not speak to you
As you lay alone?
Why only a moment or two
Til silent seeds were sown?
This was to be the time for me
To reckon what lay in truth.
To laugh and smile and cry with thee—
The man who made my youth.
......
weather you breathe in
by Rikske Kessner
"weather you breathe in"
Grief is a solitary room,
it widens into a shared landscape,
some days that landscape itself
not gone
but part of the very air
......
briefly
by Rikske Kessner
briefly
Morning’s borrowed light
slides in unasked,
a soft spill across the floorboards,
easy as breath on a cool pane.
......
