Grief Poems - Page Three

Edwin Brock – When My Father Died

On the day my father died
All the hoops in the neighborhood rang
Skate wheels shrilled on summer pavements
And I in my blakey boots clanged one foot in each gutter

On the day my father died
Girls were running autumn eyed, with wild hair
And hands of silk; peg tops had come round again
And in the sky the angels were as plain as wings

But on the day my father died
White faces fell from every window
And every house found rooms of tears to hide
While I, joy – jumping, empty eyed sang on the day my father died

Now my father dies a little every day
And the faces from each window grow like mine.

Emily Dickinson – Parting

My life closed twice before it’s close –
It yet remains to see
If immortality unveil
A third event to me

So huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.

Louis Macneice – The Suicide

And this, ladies and gentlemen, whom I am not in fact
Conducting, was his office all those minutes ago,
This man you never heard of. There are the bills
In the in tray, the ash in the ash tray, the grey memoranda stacked
Against him, the serried ranks of the box files, the packed
Jury of his unanswered correspondence
Nodding under the paper weight in the breeze
From the window by which he left; and here is the cracked
Receiver that never got mended and here is the jotter
With his last doodle which might be his own digestive tract
Ulcer and all or might be the flowery maze
Through which he had wandered deliciously till he stumbled
Suddenly finally conscious of all he lacked
On a manhole under the hollyhocks. The pencil
Point had obviously broken, yet, when he left this room
By catdrop sleight-of-foot or simple vanishing act
To those who knew him for all that mess in the street
This man with the shy smile has left behind
Something that was intact.

Roma Thomas – Journey

In the car
Driving home through the fog
Sealed outside
I shout
Dead, dead, dead
Why is he dead?

I rage in my steel box.
I want to drive to where you are
But I can only drive home
Shouting
Dead, dead, dead.

Bruce Dawe – Going

Mum, you would have loved the way you went!
One moment, at a Barbecue in the garden
- the next, falling out of your chair,
Hamburger in one hand,
And a grandson yelling.

Zipp! The heart’s roller blind
Rattling up, and you, in an old dress
Quite still, flown already from your dearly – loved
Lyndon, leaving only a bruise like a blue kiss
On the side of your face, the seed-beds incredibly tidy,
Grass daunted by drought.

You’d have loved it, mum, you big spender! The relatives,
Eyes narrowed with grief, swelling the rooms
With their clumsiness, the reverberations of tears, the endless
Cuppas and groups revolving blinded as moths.

The joy of your going! The laughing reminiscences
Snagged on the pruned roses
In the bright blowing day!

Tim Cumming – The Balcony

A few minutes after my father dies
A doctor from the nightshift enters
To confirm his death. He’s dead, and we walk
Onto the balcony of the patients television room
Where it is quiet, and watch the ferry from Boulogne
Dock into the harbour of the town.
My brother says something.
I don’t know what he does with his hands.
We don’t know what to do with ourselves.
Back home, we fathers pills
Fill the cupboard above the boiler,
And his glasses on a shelf above the sink.
Paper with his writing on it,
Written two or three years earlier.
Hair in an electric shaver.
The remains of a hurried lunch, and ground coffee.
When the priest is called
He comes with the obedience of his calling.
We take an elevator, and find the car
By automatic reflex.
It rains several times. I don’t sleep .

Tess Gallagher – Yes

Now we are like that flat cone of sand
In the garden of the silver pavilion in Kyoto
Designed to appear only in moonlight.

Do you want me to mourn?
Do you want me to wear black?

Or like moonlight on whitest sand
To use your dark, to gleam, to shimmer?

I gleam. I mourn.

Pamela Gillilan – When you died

When you died
They burnt you.
They brought home to me
A vase of thin metal;
Inside, a plastic bag
Crammed, full of gritty pieces.
Ground bones, not silky ash.

Where shall I put this substance?
Shall I scatter it
With customary thoughts
Of nature’s mystical balance
Among the roses?

Shall I disperse it into the winds
That blow across Cambeake cliff
Or drop it onto places where you
Lived, worked, were happy?

Finally, shall I perhaps keep it
Which after all was you
Quietly on a shelf
And when I follow
My old grit can lie
No matter where with yours
Slowly sinking into the earth together.

Diana Hendry – Funeral Dance

The spire is as perfectly centered
As the black and white priest in the doorway.
Left of centre stands a large yew.
Six staunch bearers pace the path.
On the raw oak box, the shields of flowers
Are heraldic crests that mock
Our claims. Outside the gates
The mourners make two half moons.

Bach could have set it as a four-part fugue
But for the two shapeless figures
In sullen grey who stumble, un-synchronized
After the coffin, breaking the dance
Draining the colour out of the grass,
Making the priest seem sawdust and silk,
Neutralizing spire, yew tree, arch.

Lotte Kramer – Visit

In May she knew
These were the steep
Hours of her dying.

By her bedside
We talked of apples
We would pick
In her orchard
In the autumn,

Legitimate lies
Fighting cold vertigo;
We need that solace
To see us through
Her intelligent presence.