Request

[3butterflies.livejournal.com]

Hi.

We've just had a loss in my extended family. Can anyone post any beautiful poems about death? Not any too religious or too sappy?

**EDIT: This had turned out to be a beautiful thread. Thank you for all of your kind words.

Comments

[birdcages.livejournal.com]

"The Truth the Dead Know" by Anne Sexton

Gone, I say and walk from church,
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape. I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and we touch. In another country people die.

My darling, the wind falls in like stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch
we enter touch entirely. No one's alone.
Men kill for this, or for as much.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
in their stone boats. They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.