Written by
Donald Hall |
when my father had been dead a week
I woke with his voice in my ear
I sat up in bed
and held my breath
and stared at the pale closed door
white apples and the taste of stone
if he called again
I would put on my coat and galoshes
|
Written by
Louise Gluck |
In the story of Patroclus
no one survives, not even Achilles
who was nearly a god.
Patroclus resembled him; they wore
the same armor.
Always in these friendships
one serves the other, one is less than the other:
the hierarchy
is always apparant, though the legends
cannot be trusted--
their source is the survivor,
the one who has been abandoned.
What were the Greek ships on fire
compared to this loss?
In his tent, Achilles
grieved with his whole being
and the gods saw
he was a man already dead, a victim
of the part that loved,
the part that was mortal.
|
Written by
Li Po |
The living is a passing traveler;
The dead, a man come home.
One brief journey betwixt heaven and earth,
Then, alas! we are the same old dust of ten thousand ages.
The rabbit in the moon pounds the medicine in vain;
Fu-sang, the tree of immortality, has crumbled to kindling wood.
Man dies, his white bones are dumb without a word
When the green pines feel the coming of the spring.
Looking back, I sigh; looking before, I sigh again.
What is there to prize in the life's vaporous glory?
|
Written by
Paul Laurence Dunbar |
Out in the sky the great dark clouds are massing;
I look far out into the pregnant night,
Where I can hear the solemn booming gun
And catch the gleaming of a random light,
That tells me that the ship I seek
is passing, passing.
My tearful eyes my soul's deep hurt are glassing;
For I would hail and check that ship of ships.
I stretch my hands imploring, cry aloud,
My voice falls dead a foot from mine own lips,
And but its ghost doth reach that vessel, passing, passing.
O Earth, O Sky, O Ocean, both surpassing,
O heart of mine, O soul that dreads the dark!
Is there no hope for me? Is there no way
That I may sight and check that speeding bark
Which out of sight and sound is passing, passing?
|
Written by
Walt Whitman |
WORD over all, beautiful as the sky!
Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost;
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night, incessantly softly wash again, and ever
again,
this
soil’d world:
.
.
.
For my enemy is dead—a man divine as myself is dead;
I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin—I draw near;
I bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.
|
Written by
Paul Celan |
In the story of Patroclus
no one survives, not even Achilles
who was nearly a god.
Patroclus resembled him; they wore
the same armor.
Always in these friendships
one serves the other, one is less than the other:
the hierarchy
is always apparant, though the legends
cannot be trusted--
their source is the survivor,
the one who has been abandoned.
What were the Greek ships on fire
compared to this loss?
In his tent, Achilles
grieved with his whole being
and the gods saw
he was a man already dead, a victim
of the part that loved,
the part that was mortal.
|
Written by
Christian Bobin |
Into the crucible of my solitude,
you enter like the dawn, you surge forward like fire.
You sweep into my soul like a river bursting its banks.
And your laughter floods all my lands.
When I looked deep inside myself, I found nothing:
there, where everything was dark, a huge sun was turning.
There where everything was dead, a small spring was dancing.
A tiny woman who took up so much space:
I could not believe it.
Love is the only true knowledge.
Love itself is an impenetrable mystery.
Christian Bobin
(translated by C.
Johnston)
|
Written by
Emily Dickinson |
That odd old man is dead a year --
We miss his stated Hat.
'Twas such an evening bright and stiff
His faded lamp went out.
Who miss his antiquated Wick --
Are any hoar for him?
Waits any indurated mate
His wrinkled coming Home?
Oh Life, begun in fluent Blood
And consummated dull!
Achievement contemplating thee --
Feels transitive and cool.
|
Written by
Rupert Brooke |
He wakes, who never thought to wake again,
Who held the end was Death.
He opens eyes
Slowly, to one long livid oozing plain
Closed down by the strange eyeless heavens.
He lies;
And waits; and once in timeless sick surmise
Through the dead air heaves up an unknown hand,
Like a dry branch.
No life is in that land,
Himself not lives, but is a thing that cries;
An unmeaning point upon the mud; a speck
Of moveless horror; an Immortal One
Cleansed of the world, sentient and dead; a fly
Fast-stuck in grey sweat on a corpse's neck.
I thought when love for you died, I should die.
It's dead.
Alone, most strangely, I live on.
|
Written by
John Berryman |
In a blue series towards his sleepy eyes
they slid like wonder, women tall & small,
of every shape & size,
in many languages to lisp 'We do'
to Henry almost waking.
What is the night at all,
his closed eyes beckon you.
In the Marriage of the Dead, a new routine,
he gasped his crowded vows past lids shut tight
and a-many rings fumbled on.
His coffin like Grand Central to the brim
filled up & emptied with the lapse of light.
Which one will waken him?
O she must startle like a fallen gown,
content with speech like an old sacrament
in deaf ears lying down,
blazing through darkness till he feels the cold
& blindness of his hopeless tenement
while his black arms unfold.
|