Death and Dying Poetry chosen by Kay Fowler

THE ANSWER

Stephen Berg

Yes, Autumn. The leaves yellow and red.

When I got up this morning.

No clouds, no thoughts, only the sky.

I slept downstairs, redreaming

The dream

Where Iπm talking with my father

Who says heπll meet me for lunch,

His face so undeniably his that when I wake

Iπm sure he will. Thatπs why

I drove out here again. Not that heπs here.

I just wanted to be by myself

With the drifting water and bright sky

So I drove fast to the spot I love between

The first stone balcony with its war heroes

And the bronze rower shipping his oars

And slid out and ran under the yellow and red trees

Looking up at them as I passed and they passed.

And forgot him.

Because I can now, because

His sad, square, bitterly joking face

Rises by itself through me ≠

The way a cloud floats in suddenly, shifts, breaks up and disappears ≠

And will until I go

Back to the placelessness before us, after us.

It isnπt even love that does this, or needing somebody, it isnπt

Even the sick miracle of being human or the leaves

Blown down crackling underfoot.

I canπt explain. And Iπm happy not trying to.

Today your silence was what I hear every time

I go out at night

And stand still and donπt look ≠

A chanting of stars and ants, the dry

Grass and leaves congregating by accident, the buzz

Of the empty world, answering.

For deLawd

Lucille Clifton (from In the Midst of Winter, ed. Mary Jane Moffat, 156)

people say they have a hard time
understanding how I go on about my business
playing my Ray Charles
hollering at the kids --
seems like my Afro
cut off in some old image
would show I got a long memory
and I come from a line
of black and going on women
who got used to making it through murdered sons
and who grief kept on pushing
who fried chicken
ironed
swept off the back steps
who grief kept
for their still alive sons
for their sons coming
for their sons gone
just pushing

Triad
Adelaide Crapsey

These be
Three silent things:
The falling snow ... the hour
Before the dawn ... the mouth of one
Just dead.

I Measure Every Grief I Meet (561)

Emily Dickinson

I measure every grief I meet

With analytic eyes;

I wonder if it weighs like mine,

Or has an easier size.

I wonder if they bore it long,

Or did it just begin?

I could not tell the date of mine,

It feels so old a pain.

I wonder if it hurts to live,

And if they have to try,

And whether, could they choose between,

They would not rather die.

I wonder if when years have piled--

Some thousands--on the cause

Of early hurt, if such a lapse

Could give them any pause;

Or would they go on aching still

Through centuries above,

Enlightened to a larger pain

By contrast with the love.

Because I Could Not Stop for Death (27)

Emily Dickinson

BECAUSE I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
We slowly drove, he knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school where children played
At wrestling in a ring;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.
We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;

The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.
Since then ‡t is centuries; but each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.

Haiku

Robert Dilly

I closed his eyes
too long open --
at last tonight
snow on the mountain

72. "Death be not proud, though some have called thee"

John Donne

DEATH be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.

Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
and poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell'st thou then;

One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

Robert Frost

"Home Burial" (from The Poetry of Robert Frost)

He saw her from the bottom of the stairs

Before she saw him. She was starting down,

Looking back over her shoulder at some fear.

She took a doubtful step and then undid it

To raise herself and look again. He spoke

Advancing toward her: 'What is it you see

From up there always--for I want to know.'

She turned and sank upon her skirts at that,

And her face changed from terrified to dull.

He said to gain time: 'What is it you see,'

Mounting until she cowered under him.

'I will find out now--you must tell me, dear.'

She, in her place, refused him any help

With the least stiffening of her neck and silence.

She let him look, sure that he wouldn't see,

Blind creature; and awhile he didn't see.

But at last he murmured, 'Oh,' and again, 'Oh.'



'What is it--what?' she said.

'Just that I see.'



'You don't,' she challenged. 'Tell me what it is.'



'The wonder is I didn't see at once.

I never noticed it from here before.

I must be wonted to it--that's the reason.

The little graveyard where my people are!

So small the window frames the whole of it.

Not so much larger than a bedroom, is it?

There are three stones of slate and one of marble,

Broad-shouldered little slabs there in the sunlight

On the sidehill. We haven't to mind those.

But I understand: it is not the stones,

But the child's mound--'



'Don't, don't, don't, don't,' she cried.



She withdrew shrinking from beneath his arm

That rested on the bannister, and slid downstairs;

And turned on him with such a daunting look,

He said twice over before he knew himself:

'Can't a man speak of his own child he's lost?'



'Not you! Oh, where's my hat? Oh, I don't need it!

I must get out of here. I must get air.

I don't know rightly whether any man can.'



'Amy! Don't go to someone else this time.

Listen to me. I won't come down the stairs.'

He sat and fixed his chin between his fists.

'There's something I should like to ask you, dear.'



'You don't know how to ask it.'



'Help me, then.'



Her fingers moved the latch for all reply.



'My words are nearly always an offense.

I don't know how to speak of anything

So as to please you. But I might be taught

I should suppose. I can't say I see how.

A man must partly give up being a man

With women-folk. We could have some arrangement

By which I'd bind myself to keep hands off

Anything special you're a-mind to name.

Though I don't like such things 'twixt those that love.

Two that don't love can't live together without them.

But two that do can't live together with them.'

She moved the latch a little. 'Don't--don't go.

Don't carry it to someone else this time.

Tell me about it if it's something human.

Let me into your grief. I'm not so much

Unlike other folks as your standing there

Apart would make me out. Give me my chance.

I do think, though, you overdo it a little.

What was it brought you up to think it the thing

To take your mother--loss of a first child

So inconsolably--in the face of love.

You'd think his memory might be satisfied--'



'There you go sneering now!'



'I'm not, I'm not!

You make me angry. I'll come down to you.

God, what a woman! And it's come to this,

A man can't speak of his own child that's dead.'



'You can't because you don't know how to speak.

If you had any feelings, you that dug

With your own hand--how could you?--his little grave;

I saw you from that very window there,

Making the gravel leap and leap in air,

Leap up, like that, like that, and land so lightly

And roll back down the mound beside the hole.

I thought, Who is that man? I didn't know you.

And I crept down the stairs and up the stairs

To look again, and still your spade kept lifting.

Then you came in. I heard your rumbling voice

Out in the kitchen, and I don't know why,

But I went near to see with my own eyes.

You could sit there with the stains on your shoes

Of the fresh earth from your own baby's grave

And talk about your everyday concerns.

You had stood the spade up against the wall

Outside there in the entry, for I saw it.'



'I shall laugh the worst laugh I ever laughed.

I'm cursed. God, if I don't believe I'm cursed.'



'I can repeat the very words you were saying.

"Three foggy mornings and one rainy day

Will rot the best birch fence a man can build."

Think of it, talk like that at such a time!

What had how long it takes a birch to rot

To do with what was in the darkened parlor.

You couldn't care! The nearest friends can go

With anyone to death, comes so far short

They might as well not try to go at all.

No, from the time when one is sick to death,

One is alone, and he dies more alone.

Friends make pretense of following to the grave,

But before one is in it, their minds are turned

And making the best of their way back to life

And living people, and things they understand.

But the world's evil. I won't have grief so

If I can change it. Oh, I won't, I won't!'



'There, you have said it all and you feel better.

You won't go now. You're crying. Close the door.

The heart's gone out of it: why keep it up.

Amy! There's someone coming down the road!'



'You--oh, you think the talk is all. I must go--

Somewhere out of this house. How can I make you--'



'If--you--do!' She was opening the door wider.

'Where do you mean to go? First tell me that.

I'll follow and bring you back by force. I will!--'

Each Bird Walking

Tess Gallagher

Not while, but long after he had told me,
I thought of him, washing his mother, his
bending over the bed and taking back
the covers.  There was a basin of water
and he dipped a washrag in and
out of the basin, the rag
dripping a little onto the sheet as he
turned from the bedside to the nightstand
and back, there being no place

on her body he shouldn't touch because
he had to and she helped him, moving
the little she could, lifting so he could
wipe under her arms, a dipping motion
in the hollow.  then working up from
her feet, around the ankles, over the
knees.  And this last, opening
her thighs and running the rag firmly
and with the cleaning thought
up through her crotch, between the lips,
over the V of thin hairs --

as though he were a mother
who had the excuse of cleaning to touch
with love and indifference
the secret parts of her child, to graze
the sleepy sexlessness in its waiting
to find out what to do for the sake
of the body, for the sake of what only
the body can do for itself.

So his hand, softly at the place
of his birth-light.  and she, eyes deepened
and closed in the dim room.
And because he told me her death as
important to his being with her,
I could love him another way.  Not
of the body alone, or of its making
but carried in the white spires of trembling
until what spirit, what breat we were
was shaken from us.  Small then,
the word holy.

He turned her on her stomach
and washed the blades of her shoulders, the
small of her back.  "That's good," she said,
"that's enough."

On our lips that morning, the tart juice
of the mothers, so strong in remembrance, no
asking, no giving, and what you said, this
being the end of our loving, so as not to hurt
the closer one to you, made me look
to see what was left of us
with our sex taken away.  "Tell me," I said,
"something I can't forget."  Then the story of
your mother, and when you finished
I said, "That's good, that's enough."

Those Winter Sundays

Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he'd call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love's austere and lonely offices? A Nation Wrapped in Stone

for Susan Iron Shell

Roberta Hill

When night shadows slipped across the plain, I saw a man
beside his horse, sleeping where neither man nor horse
had been. I've prayed
to a star that lied. The spirits near the ceiling of your room,
did they leave on horseback, turning dew into threads
by moonlight?

In wild stretch of days, you didn't fear ashes or weeping.
We, left behind, can't warm sunlight.
Isaac, you left with the wind.

The chokecherry grows slower. I held your trembling wife,
and windows trembled in our north room. The creek gnaws
remaining snow. Our blood runs pale.

You taught us to be kind to one another. Now we wake, questioning
our dreams. Nighthawks in warm fog. A nation wrapped in stone.
What do nurses know of hay, of scents that float broken between canyons,
of strength in a worn face? You wept love, not death.
Around your bed, owls stood

The north wind hunts us with music, enough pain
to set fires in ancient hills. West winds growl
around Parmalee.
The tanned, uneven banks will hold more frost. Unlike dust
we cannot die from tears. You've settled on a quiet prairie. Shrouded eyes
in thickets give a reason to contain
this heavy rind. We are left with grief, sinking boneward,
and time to watch rain soak the trees.

to a young child

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By & by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you will weep & know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Hurt Hawks

by Robinson Jeffers

I

The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder,

The wing trails like a banner in defeat,

No more to use the sky forever but live with famine

And pain a few days: cat nor coyote

Will shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons.

He stands under the oak-bush and waits

The lame feet of salvation; at night he remembers freedom

And flies in a dream, the dawns ruin it.

He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse.

The curs of the day come and torment him

At distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head,

The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes.

The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those

That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant.

You do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him;

Intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him;

Beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that are dying, remember him.

II

I'd sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk;

but the great redtail

Had nothing left but unable misery

From the bone too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved.

We had fed him six weeks, I gave him freedom,

He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening, asking for death,

Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old

Implacable arrogance.

I gave him the lead gift in the twilight.

What fell was relaxed, Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what

Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising

Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.

The Purse-Seine
(20th century)

Robinson Jeffers

Our sardine fishermen work at night in the dark of the moon; daylight or moonlight
They could not tell where to spread the net, unable to see the phosphorescence of the shoals of fish.
They work northward from Monterey, coasting Santa Cruz; off New Year's Point or off Pigeon Point
The look-out man will see some lakes of milk-color light on the sea's night-purple; he points, and the helmsman
Turns the dark prow, the motorboat circles the gleaming shoal and drifts out her seine-net.  They close the circle
And purse the bottom of the net, then with great labor haul it in.

        I cannot tell you
How beautiful the scene is, and a little terrible, then, when the crowded fish
Know they are caught, and wildly beat from one wall to the other of their closing destiny the phosphorescent
Water to a pool of flame, each beautiful slender body sheeted with flames like a live rocket
A comet's tail wake of clear yellow flame; while outside the marvelous
Floats and cordage of the net great sea-lions come up to watch, sighing in the dark; the vast walls of night
Stand erect to the stars.

                                                  Lately I was looking from a night mountain-top
On a wide city, the colored splendor, galaxies of light: how could I help but recall the

          seine-net
Gathering the luminous fish?  I cannot tell you how beautiful the city appeared, and a little terrible.
I thought, We have gathered vast populations incapable of free survival, insulated
From the strong earth, each person in himself helpless, on all dependent.
The circle is closed, and the net
Is being hauled in.  They hardly feel the cords drawing, yet the shine already.  The inevitable mass-disasters
Will not come in our time nor in our children's, but we and our children
Must watch the net draw narrower, government take all powers -- or revolution, and

    the new government
Take more than all, add to kept bodies kept souls -- or anarchy, the mass-disasters.

                                                                        These things are Progress;
Do you marvel our verse is troubled or frowning, while it keeps its reason?  Or it lets go, lets the mood flow
In the manner of the recent young men into mere hysteria, splintered gleams, crackled laughter.  But they are quite wrong.
There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew that cultures decay, and life's end is death.

Talking to Grief

Denise Levertov

Ah, Grief, I should not treat you

like a homeless dog

who comes to the back door

for a crust, for a meatless bone.

I should trust you.

I should coax you

into the house and give you

your own corner,

a worn mat to lie on,

your own water dish.

You think I don't know you've been living

under my porch.

You long for your real place to be readied

before winter comes. You need

your name,

your collar and tag. You need

the right to warn off intruders,

to consider

my house your own

and me your person

and yourself

my own dog.

Memorial I

Audre Lorde

If you come as softly
as wind within the trees
you may hear what I hear
see what sorrow sees.

If you come as lightly
as the threading dew
I shall take you gladly
nor ask more of you.

You may sit beside me
silent as a breath
and only those who stay dead
shall remember death.

If you come I will be silent
nor speak harsh words to you --
I will not ask you why, now,
nor how, nor what you knew.

But we shall sit here softly
beneath two different yers
and the rich earth between us
shall drink our tears.

FROM GILGAMESH

Herbert Mason

I asked unanswerable questions a child asks

When a parent dies ≠ for nothing. Only slowly

Did I make myself believe ≠ or hope ≠ they

Might all be swept un pin their gragments

Together

And made whole again

By some compassionate hand.

But my hand was too small

To do the gathering.

I have only known this feeling since

When I looked out across the sea of death,

This pull inside against a littleness ≠ myself

Waiting for an upward gesture.

BLOSSOM

Mary Oliver

In April
the ponds
open
like black blossoms
the moon
swims in every one;
there's fire
everywhere: frogs shouting
their desire,
their satisfaction. What
we know: that time
chops at us all like an iron
hoe, that death
is a state of paralysis. What
we long for: joy
before death, nights
in the swale -- everything else
can wait but not
this thrust
from the root
of the body. What
we know: we are more
than blood -- we are more
than our hunger and yet
we belong
to the moon and when the ponds
open, when the burning
begins the most
thoughtful among us dreams
of hurrying down
into the black petals,
into the fire,
into the night where time lies shattered,
into the body of another.

Anthem for Doomed Youth

Wilfred Owen (1920)

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
--Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of morning save the choirs, --
The shrill demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
September-October 1917

P'u-Shen Shang Man

Li Ch'ing Chao (from In the Midst of Winter, ed. Mary Jane Moffat, 112)

Unending search in endless quest
So cold and still, how cold and still;
By grief and anguish, grief and anguish hard oppressed.

This season of the sudden change from warm to chill
Weighs down the heart in search of peace.
Cupfuls of light wine, two or three;
How else confront the wind that blows at dusk most urgently?

Even the flighting geese have stabbed me to the heart,
Friends that fly past me out of older memories
Chrysanthemums in yellow masses everywhere:

Melancholy has marked them for its own
For whom are they worth gathering growing there?
Watching from my window all alone

How am I to live until the darkness falls?
Fine rain is falling, too, into the wu t'ung trees;
Plodding drop by drop down into the dusk's uncertainties.
Tell me, with this, then, with all this,
How can the one word "sorrow" paint what sorrow is?

Translated from the Chinese by Duncan Mackintosh; rendered into verse by Alan Ayling

DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT

Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

To Waken an Old Lady

William Carlos Williams

Old age is
a flight of small
cheeping birds
skimming
bare trees
above a snow glaze.
Gaining and failing
they are buffeted by a dark wind --
But what?
On harsh weedstalks
the flock has rested,
the snow
is covered with broken
seedhusks
and the wind tempered
by a shrill
piping of plenty. (1938)