My heart cries out in longing for my dear,
imploring Him who holds you now: draw near.
Twenty-five years have passed,
yet the memory still remains,
a morning filled with sorrow,
a nation washed in pain.
The towers reached toward heaven,
then disappeared from sight,
leaving behind a silence
that still echoes every night.
We remember those who never
made it home that day,
the mothers, fathers, sons and daughters
who were taken far away.
We remember every hero
who ran toward the flame,
while others ran for safety,
they answered when we called their name.
The firefighters and the officers,
the strangers helping strangers too,
the countless acts of courage
from red, white, and blue.
We remember those in heaven,
and the families left behind,
the empty chairs, the photographs,
the memories frozen in time.
Though years may pass before us,
their stories will not fade.
For every life that was taken,
a promise must be made:
To remember their names,
to honor what they gave,
to cherish those beside us,
and never forget the brave.
So today we bow our heads,
with hearts both proud and torn,
and whisper through the years:
We remember.
We honor.
We will never forget.
When shadows lengthen and the day grows still,
I lean into the quiet, soft and deep,
Just pulling up the blankets for a sleep.
It feels like resting after years of work,
Like sitting down when all the chores are done,
No heavy doubts or fears that try to lurk,
Just watching out the window, the fading sun.
My breathing slows, a simple, steady rhythm,
And all the noise inside begins to clear,
I leave the weight of everyday right with them,
And find a strange, gentle stillness here.
No dramatic exit, no pain to fight or mend,
Just letting go, and letting darkness blend.
A Piece of You
Dearest Papa, she is looking at me
With the stillness you once had
Your reflection so profound
Clouds of happiness in the storm of sad
The way she crosses her feet
The way she rests on her arm
I see you in her, I feel you Dad
In the chaos of life, I can sense your calm
A little piece of you, God has given me in her
New hopes, deep courage, joys anew
For the life, the love and for Her
I Thank you
The Journals find their way,
easy, inspired self delusional displays,
one or two ,
written most every day,
but as the months now years begin their exit call,
the words flow more fluidly
than time alone can recall,
written down along line and page
the secret refuge of mind sway
left to random flutterings and utterings
the missing points of this aging sage,
hide in the accumulated books
shelved on dusty nooks
of private enterprise without lie
the wordings not for you.
Between the rise and fall of thought
there lies a hush unnamed,
a breath unclaimed by wanting’s pull,
a light not yet made flame.
Here grief forgets its practiced shape,
and hope loosens its hold;
the heart stands still, unchoosing sides,
neither timid nor bold.
Time thins into a listening space
where echoes lose their will,
where loss and gain grow indistinct
and longing learns to still.
I mourn the self that hurried on,
that feared this vacant air,
mistaking silence for a lack,
and grasping everywhere.
For craving snaps the tender pause
like wire around the bone,
and ego crowns itself again
as ruler, name, and throne.
Yet in that brief suspended hour
so easily undone
the world remembers how to rest,
and I remember none.
Not triumph, nor defeat survives
that interval of grace:
only the ache of what we were,
and what we dare not chase.
So let me grieve with open hands
the noise I once called true,
and bow to that unmoving gap
where sorrow loosens too.
For in the pause of polar turn,
where opposites resign,
I touch the silence after self
and leave my sign behind.
In the words of Karl Marx "Last words are for fools who haven't said enough!"
We had lived a life of love and everyday
said more than words can say.
When it was time to say goodbye,
my heart I handed you with a just a sigh.
AP: 2nd place 2025
I hear the screams of pain,
Falling on deaf ears in vain.
I see children crying over dead parents,
And parents crying over dead children,
While spouses cry over their dead mates,
I try not to panic as they lead me to a camp,
As the fear of future leaves my cheeks damp.
The darkness of the explosion surrounds me,
While I try to shield myself from the painful emotional heat.
And run away to not turn into a lifeless meat.
It leaves the children traumatized,
And the children terrorized,
As they struggle to live their way out of a mass homicide.
The gods cease to exist,
And leave us with the sadistic devils to resist.
I see my future in the flames,
And my entire life bursting up in their diabolical games.
I hold my friend’s hand,
As I see everything I cherish, crumbling into the sand.
Hope seems to be miles away,
When all I see is the slope of barrel pointing my way.
So I do what I need to do,
I kneel. I bow. And I surrender.
And finally let a tear fall,
Before my soul leaves my body with a guns thunder.
The line "Looks like a good night to fly"
last words of a Reddit user's great-uncle referred to as Gillybilly
Gillybilly's great-uncle was a Navy pilot in WW II who flew jets for 30 years
I've been behind bars for way too long
each time a prison warden sings that same old song,
"When you've done your time Bub we will release yous"
I'd shuffle my cards then let them fall, hadn't I paid my dues?
They called it psychosis, a personality disorder that distorts reality
it seems to me I have been in here for Oh! a mere eternity!
"Unable to understand his wrongful actions, cuff those guys!" they said,
I replied, "Its a good day to die" in my killer clown's disguise
When the Commissioner said, " go ahead release him " to the guards
I washed my face, combed my hair, and played my last trump card
Sitting on the grass watching the last shards of light, I was glad I didn't die
I came to realize that I was now alone, ... "Looks like a good day to fly"
I whispered to a bat as he soared hard and fast against the sky,
"Looks like a good night to fly," and then I began to cry !
For sixty years he sang and
Everyone knew his voice.
Then he had to retire,
But it wasn’t his choice.
He loved his singing lifestyle
As well as his boozing.
But it caught up with him and
He told Barbara, “I'm loosing.”
The only thing we can
Depend on is death.
But no one knows when
They’ll take that last breath.
And I don’t want loosing
To be part of my fate.
I want to know I’ll enter
That pearly white gate!
I don’t know if Old Blue Eyes
Sings up in heaven today.
I do know that Jesus
Has shown me the way.
And if he’s there too,
Then we’ll sing together.
It won’t be loosing if we sing
Praises forever and ever!
Chases me down a paint-stained alley.
My feet are swollen—maybe someday they’ll rot
Exhausted from the brush stroke agony
I seize when the light forces itself upon me
When will I decide to turn myself into dust
Deranged is what I seem to be
They locked me in a rage-filled scene
Hearing petrified, hate-charged screams.
Peering through the curtains as I wake from restless sleep
Staring at a starry night
It sings me a melodic, stunning melody
Maybe the air that flows through my lungs
Perhaps the heart that pumps my blood
Is not what I truly need
Maybe a pistol will give me ultimate peace
Perhaps a bullet will allow me to foresee
As I lay near my brother
I don't sob, I don't plead
The life I lived wasn't for me
“The sadness will last forever”
It won't be cured by remedies
So I must cut short my legacy
The rope that strangled me with miseries
My death is not a tragedy
Not succumbing to eternity
at a death bed, but at the cross
My Saviour and Lord gave up the ghost…
According to the Scriptures in John 19:30,
“When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar,
he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost.”
Yes, at His crucifixion, He declared, “It is finished.”
Such was and is always a statement of great triumph
Reverberating God’s compassion toward every human
Offering His gift of eternal life to sinners like you and me.
Indeed, He uttered, “It is finished.”
Such is His assurance of everlasting redemption
Reaching-out to those who believe His sacrificial work
By faith… believing Him as the way, the truth, and the life.
Gloriously, He proclaimed, “It is finished.”
Such is now my vibrant hope as I strive and persist
To share the Gospel, testifying of His loving kindness
And by His grace, cheering others with His peace and joy.
With His omnipotence, He asserted, “It is finished.”
Such keeps me going on, persevering to do my best
Maximizing opportunities for functional role-performance
So that when I face Him, I’ll say, “By Your mercy, I finished the race.”
The room hums with invisible prayers—
blue sparks dancing like ghosts of forgotten thunder.
He dies lit by his own inventions,
a cathedral of current pulsing behind his eyes.
The pigeons wait by the window,
feathers like folded circuits of forgiveness.
He speaks to the air as if to the future,
“They will laugh first. They always do.”
Outside, the streetlights blink in silent salute,
filaments bowing in quiet understanding.
Greatness flickers, then steadies—
not extinguished, but absorbed
into the bright machinery of night.
"I want nothing but death." - Jane Austen
Fatigue, weakness, and bilious attacks
I am dying day by day, night by night.
Each of my bones, like a worn-out twig, cracks.
Each split moment is an eternal fight.
My eyes yearn to see my bright day of death.
When my worries will be buried with me
Gentle breezes of heaven fill my breath.
Angels and seraphs all around I see.
Poesy has gone dry like desert streams.
Nocturnal beings pervade my blank mind.
I miss those buoyant aureate sunbeams.
Within my withering self I'm confined.
Let this life here on earth end like a feast.
Let me, from all my bondages, be released!
“Give me my glasses”…..
Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens)
aged 74 who immediately after died of a heart attack
There it comes and here I go
the Halley’s comet streaming past
millennium's of existence,
glowing in the dark skies above
Mississippi, like the day it did when
I was born. Stories, fables and laughs
and all! Now it is my final call! The comet waits
with its chariot of haze and glows, but it
has room for just one more,
I shall journey with it past the galaxies,
for millions of years, through eternity, before I get
another call- to be something that nature
may choose. Right now just give me the glasses,
so I can survey the skies for my travel pass,
to re-enter that domain of eternal preservation,
leaving my mortal cask to merge with earth,
but my heart shall resonate with Tom and Huckle,
their joys and pranks worth a chuckle,
while I make my way to the stellar state,
and in there, no life, no death, no fate.
Introduction
Grief changes shape when placed beside another person's grief. One poem may speak directly to the absent beloved; another may circle a room, object, season, or remembered gesture before naming what has been lost. Reading Elegiac Lyrics side by side makes those differences vivid. The shared emotional territory sharpens attention to voice, restraint, memory, and the difficult question of how a poem can end when sorrow itself has not ended.
As you browse the community poems, expect variety in scale and approach. Some writers may concentrate on a single intimate detail, while others may include narrative, reflection, tribute, anger, spiritual questioning, or moments of unexpected humor. A poet can speak from the first shock of absence, from years of retrospect, or from a moment when an ordinary experience suddenly reopens remembrance. The lyric focus gives each choice unusual weight: a repeated name, a withheld explanation, or a quiet change of tense can carry an entire emotional history.
One isolated example can suggest that elegiac feeling has a preferred tone or progression. Reading beyond the first example reveals how many routes a poet can take through mourning and remembrance. Compare what each speaker praises, what remains unsaid, and whether comfort arrives as conviction, possibility, resistance, or not at all. The collection becomes especially rewarding when readers notice not merely what was lost, but how each poet creates a living verbal relationship with that absence.
Reading Guide
Read an Elegiac Lyric slowly enough to notice how the poem manages emotional distance. The subject may be immediately moving, but the deeper craft often lies in when the speaker approaches the loss, when the speaker retreats into image or memory, and what kind of acknowledgment becomes possible by the close. As you read the community poems, compare not the apparent intensity of different losses, but the artistic means by which each poem makes absence perceptible.
- Speaker and emotional distance: Notice whether the voice sounds stunned, reflective, ceremonial, conversational, angry, or composed. That distance shapes how readers enter the grief. Ask: does the speaker seem to be living through the moment, remembering it, or revising an earlier understanding?
- Direction of address: Observe whether the poem speaks to the deceased, to the self, to a witness, to a larger community, or to no named listener. Direct address can make absence feel paradoxically present. Ask: who is expected to hear these words, and what changes because of that imagined listener?
- Charged particulars: Look for objects, habits, places, bodily gestures, or fragments of speech that individualize the person or loss. Specific detail prevents tribute from becoming abstract. Ask: which image carries more feeling than an explicit statement of sorrow would?
- Sound and recurrence: Listen for repeated words, names, consonants, vowels, or sentence shapes. Recurrence can resemble ritual, recollection, or a mind returning to what it cannot resolve. Ask: does repetition deepen, alter, or merely restate the emotion?
- Emotional movement: Trace changes among lament, recollection, praise, protest, gratitude, and possible consolation. These states need not appear neatly or completely. Ask: where does the poem turn, and has that turn been earned by what precedes it?
- Lineation and silence: Notice pauses, short lines, long sentences, stanza breaks, and isolated phrases. Empty space can register hesitation or what language cannot contain. Ask: how would the emotional pressure change if the same words were arranged as ordinary prose?
- The terms of closure: Examine whether the ending offers release, continued longing, transformed memory, uncertainty, or deliberate incompletion. Ask: does the close honor the poem's complexity, or settle it too conveniently?
Compare several poets' approaches before deciding what the form can do. The strongest reading often begins where shared subject matter gives way to distinct choices of voice, image, pace, and ending.
Writing Tips
Begin with a loss that continues to exert pressure on language, not simply with a subject that seems appropriately solemn. The most workable material usually contains a tension: love complicated by anger, praise shadowed by regret, a vivid memory beside an irreversible absence, or a desire for comfort that the speaker cannot fully accept. In workshop, ask what the poem needs to discover rather than what it intends to announce.
- Choose a revealing aperture: Do not attempt to summarize an entire life unless the poem's scale genuinely requires it. A coat still hanging by the door, a familiar mispronunciation, or an unfinished task can open onto a much larger relationship. Select a detail that generates implication instead of serving merely as decoration.
- Give the speaker a present-tense need: Even when recounting the past, establish why these words must be spoken now. An anniversary, dream, object, place, or unanswered question can create immediacy. Without such pressure, remembrance may become a sequence of biographical facts rather than a lyric event.
- Let praise remain human: Idealization can flatten the person being remembered. Affection often becomes more convincing through peculiarities, disagreements, weaknesses, and mixed memories. The goal is not to diminish the lost figure but to restore dimensionality.
- Resist mechanical emotional staging: Do not force the draft through lament, tribute, and reassurance as though completing a checklist. Use those possibilities as sources of tension. The speaker may move forward, recoil, contradict an earlier claim, or discover that consolation is partial.
- Control direct statement: Plain declarations of grief can be powerful, especially after restraint, but too many explanations tell readers what the images have already conveyed. Place explicit feeling where it changes the poem's pressure. Elsewhere, trust action, sensory detail, syntax, and silence.
- Shape sound without prettifying pain: Musical language can dignify remembrance, yet excessive sweetness or conspicuous rhyme may make sorrow feel polished rather than lived. Read for subtle echoes, repeated stresses, and changes in sentence rhythm. Let sonic beauty coexist with abrasion, interruption, or plain speech when the subject demands it.
- Use length according to emotional purpose: Compression can preserve the force of one piercing recognition; expansion can accommodate story, contradiction, and layered remembrance. Do not mistake brevity for intensity or length for depth. Test whether every passage adds a new emotional or imaginative dimension.
- Earn the ending: Avoid attaching a generalized message about healing, heaven, memory, or time merely because readers anticipate consolation. A credible close may offer a modest act, altered image, unresolved address, or changed understanding. It should transform what came before without pretending to cancel the loss.
During revision, mark every abstraction, tonal shift, repeated phrase, and change of tense. Replace only the abstractions that lack support; some plain naming may be essential. Then read the draft aloud, attending to places where breath catches naturally and where line breaks manufacture drama. Finally, ask a trusted reader what remains emotionally alive after the last line. Revise toward that residue, preserving the individual voice rather than making the poem sound conventionally mournful.
Interesting Facts
- Brevity can increase difficulty. A short Elegiac Lyric has little room for context, so one object or gesture may need to suggest a relationship, a loss, and the speaker's altered life simultaneously. Compression succeeds through resonance, not through hurried summary.
- Consolation need not sound certain. A poem can preserve its elegiac identity while allowing comfort to appear as a question, temporary insight, remembered teaching, or small act of continuation. Tentative solace may feel more persuasive than a fully resolved declaration.
- Pronouns quietly control intimacy. Addressing the lost person as you can create immediate presence, while speaking of he, she, or they may emphasize distance, public remembrance, or the speaker's struggle to accept absence. A shift between pronouns can become an emotional turn.
- Repetition can perform more than remembrance. A recurring name, phrase, or image may resemble ritual, denial, insistence, or an effort to stabilize memory. Its effect depends on whether each return gathers new context or remains emotionally unchanged.
- Narrative detail and lyric concentration can cooperate. A brief scene may provide the human circumstances that reflection alone cannot supply, while lyric compression prevents the poem from becoming a complete life story. The productive question is which events illuminate the loss rather than merely document it.
- An unresolved ending can still feel complete. Closure comes from the poem finishing its movement of attention, not necessarily from the speaker overcoming grief. A final image or address may leave sorrow open while giving the poem a deliberate shape.
- Comparison reveals the form's flexibility. As you read the community poems, notice how similar materials can lead to prayer, protest, portrait, confession, meditation, or restrained farewell. No single example can display all those possibilities.
Popular Themes
Subject matter and form interact most strongly when loss is treated not as a label but as an active force shaping memory, address, and time. The themes below are literary possibilities rather than measured popularity rankings. Each can support an Elegiac Lyric because it gives the speaker something particular to remember, question, praise, resist, or carry forward.
- The death of a loved one: Intimate bereavement offers emotional urgency, but specificity is crucial. Habits, disagreements, private language, and ordinary scenes can preserve the person's individuality more effectively than generalized admiration.
- Family inheritance: A poem may mourn someone while examining the stories, gestures, beliefs, burdens, or objects passed between generations. This theme allows grief to coexist with identity and continuity.
- Friendship and chosen kinship: Remembering a friend can foreground shared jokes, formative experiences, loyalty, and the versions of ourselves that exist in another person's memory. The lyric voice can make that private history briefly audible.
- Love altered by absence: Romantic loss may involve death, separation, estrangement, or an imagined future that cannot occur. The form accommodates tenderness alongside resentment, longing, gratitude, and unfinished conversation.
- Place and disappearance: A demolished home, changed landscape, abandoned neighborhood, or inaccessible homeland can become the focus of elegiac attention. Concrete surroundings give absence a physical vocabulary and connect personal memory with change over time.
- Collective loss: Public tragedy, violence, disaster, or communal mourning may call for a voice that acknowledges suffering without claiming experiences beyond the speaker's knowledge. Carefully chosen particulars can resist both abstraction and spectacle.
- The former self: Illness, aging, migration, or irreversible change can prompt mourning for an earlier identity. This theme is especially effective when the poem complicates nostalgia by asking what was truly lost and what transformation has made possible.
Browse the poems in this collection with these possibilities in mind, but do not treat them as templates. Compare how different writers transform related losses through distinct images, forms of address, emotional turns, and degrees of consolation. Shared themes make individual craft choices easier to see.
Editorial Insights
The central artistic tension of an Elegiac Lyric lies between private grief and communicable form. Loss may resist order, yet a poem must create enough order for another person to enter the experience. If the language is entirely raw, the reader may receive intensity without shape; if it is too polished, grief can seem converted into an elegant display. Memorable poems sustain both forces. Their control does not erase disturbance, and their disturbance does not excuse imprecision.
Structure feels necessary when it arises from the speaker's way of remembering. A recurring image may enact the mind's return to an unresolved moment. A narrative passage may establish what an object or phrase once meant. A shift into direct address may reveal that the supposed recollection is actually an ongoing conversation with absence. Even movement toward praise or consolation becomes convincing only when it grows from the poem's particular circumstances. Editors notice when line breaks, pacing, sound, and emotional turns all serve the same pressure rather than decorating an already completed statement.
Predictability is the chief danger when familiar grief language arrives before individual perception. Stock images, automatic solemnity, forced uplift, and generalized claims about memory can make a sincere experience feel interchangeable. Mechanical patterning creates a related problem: repeated phrases or neatly balanced sections may announce design without deepening meaning. At the other extreme, a draft may accumulate memories without development, or explain every emotional implication until readers have nothing left to discover. Strong revision asks what changes from beginning to end-not whether grief disappears, but whether attention, understanding, address, or relation to memory has shifted.
Individuality remains visible through the speaker's exact manner of noticing. One poet may use spare declarative sentences; another may need layered syntax, narrative expansion, prayer, irony, or broken utterance. No tone is automatically more authentic. What matters is the fit between voice and subject, including the courage to admit contradiction. Reading several community poems develops discernment because it separates shared elegiac expectations from the choices that belong to one writer alone. Compare which details remain memorable, which turns feel earned, and which endings continue to resonate without over-explaining themselves. Quality becomes easier to recognize when readers encounter multiple solutions to the same artistic problem.
Read, Write & Share
Read beyond the first example and allow several community poems to speak beside one another. Compare how each poet handles memory, direct address, praise, silence, emotional turning, and the possibility of comfort. Thoughtful comments can identify a resonant image or an earned shift while respecting the personal material behind the poem.
Then try writing an Elegiac Lyric of your own. Begin with one detail that keeps returning, follow what it reveals, and publish the finished poem on PoetrySoup when it feels ready to join the conversation. Your interpretation may offer another way of understanding how language carries what cannot be recovered.
Collection Statistics
This collection currently includes 63 poems, offering readers multiple interpretations to examine rather than a single model to imitate. As you browse, compare how poets select details, shape remembrance, manage emotional turns, and approach closure. Some poems may closely follow familiar elegiac conventions, while others may adapt or challenge them in pursuit of a particular voice, relationship, or experience of loss.
Elegiac Lyric Categories
Read wonderful elegiac lyric poetry on the following sub-topics:
death, sad, love
and more.
Definition | What is Elegiac Lyric in Poetry?
Looking for the formal definition, structure, and history of this poetry form? Visit the Poetry Dictionary entry below. Then return to explore how PoetrySoup members bring the form to life through their own poems.