I would like my love to die - Samuel Beckett, and a request

[mollytravis.livejournal.com]

I've been looking for quality poetry about grief. Any suggestions?

In exchange, I offer this short Samuel Beckett poem - untitled, and translated from the French by the author.


I would like my love to die
and the rain to be falling on the graveyard
and on me walking the streets
mourning the first and last to love me.

Comments

[switchercat.livejournal.com]

"Bavarian Gentians (http://greatpoets.livejournal.com/3258593.html)," D. H. Lawrence

"Crying (http://greatpoets.livejournal.com/3352879.html)," Galway Kinnell

"Against Elegies (http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20532)," Marilyn Hacker

[bright-ephemera.livejournal.com]

O Captain, My Captain, written by Walt Whitman in mourning for Abraham Lincoln: http://www.bartleby.com/142/193.html

A sonnet of Edna St. Vincent Millay's:

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year’s bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.
There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,—so with his memory they brim.
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, “There is no memory of him here!”
And so stand stricken, so remembering him.

[bright-ephemera.livejournal.com]

My own sad favorite, anywhere, ever: Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold.

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the A gaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

[marialuminous.livejournal.com]

Some of my favorites:


"Separation" By W. S. Merwin, http://greatpoets.livejournal.com/1256221.html

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.



"By Small and Small: Midnight to Four A.M." By Jack Gilbert http://greatpoets.livejournal.com/3331011.html

For eleven years I have regretted it,
regretted that I did not do what
I wanted to do as I sat there those
four hours watching her die. I wanted
to crawl in among the machinery
and hold her in my arms, knowing
the elementary, leftover bit of her
mind would dimly recognize it was me
carrying her to where she was going.



"The Shoe" By Kathryn Starbuck

Each time I relived it, after the worst
was over, I’d say to myself, as if my fate
would solace me,
”at least I’ll never have to do this again.”
It is true that I’ll never have to kiss his
dying hands, now dead. I’ll never have
to find where he left his coffee mug, now mine.

I’ll never have to wash his hair or repair
his typewriter or stock the medicine stand.
I’ll never even have to find places
that can use his clothes because
some friend-I don’t remember who-
did that for me when I could not. I
distributed his portrait, I picked up his poems.

I thanked friends and children for helping me
hold on. I made braids out of dead funeral
flowers to border the rooms where
once he breathed and took on the heavy
chores, gladly, of loving me. I sprinkled
one teaspoon of his ashes on our bereft bed
and slept with them. They scourged my body.

But when that single shoe, the mate I thought
had got sent off with its partner, showed up
today, alone, crouching behind the couch, alive
with Effie’s opulent Turkish angora fur, I knew
solace was something I could neither seek nor
find. Oh beloved! I know I am an old woman.
But I cannot live in your shoe.

[marialuminous.livejournal.com]

And a few more:


"A Hundred Ways To Say Your Name" By Tania De Rozario http://greatpoets.livejournal.com/2619377.html

I avoid speaking your name in conversation,
throwing it to the air as if it were nothing
more than an assumption of you; it is my last
mode of defence. The last item of clothing
to discard before I realise I’m naked in public.

Because they can hear it in my voice. I know.
Even in that one short syllable that means
everything and nothing; your name is as common
as you are rare. As easy as you are not.
As simple as love should be, but never is.

But when I’m alone, I tie my tongue softly
round the familiar sound, as if pronouncing
with conviction the phonetics of desire
will cause time to pause just long enough
for the earth to hear me naming my loss.



"Starlings in Winter" By Mary Oliver http://greatpoets.livejournal.com/1045551.html

Chunky and noisy,
but with stars in their black feathers,
they spring from the telephone wire
and instantly
they are acrobats
in the freezing wind.
And now, in the theater of air,
they swing over buildings,
dipping and rising;
they float like one stippled star
that opens,
becomes for a moment fragmented,
then closes again;
and you watch
and you try
but you simply can’t imagine
how they do it
with no articulated instruction, no pause,
only the silent confirmation
that they are this notable thing,
this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin
over and over again,
full of gorgeous life.
Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;
I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard. I want
to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.

[with-rainfall.livejournal.com]

"Grief" - Bruce Dawe

You carry it like a carton of eggs
with damaged hinges along a wet asphalt
street in an unfamiliar part
of the city where the neons pulse
like sick arteries and you're mortally
aware of the sudden cat and
the slammed door and the
jangling siren with its swivelling ruby,
and you feel bruised and weak
and exceedingly tender towards what's left
babying the body on its little legs
comforting the head like a swollen plum
where birds have stabbed and probed
and you seem to be moving very carefully
in the direction of some marzipan cottage
where understanding swoops in the doorway
like a dark witch sweeping
the scrubbed stone with a twig broom
- in the folds of her woollen skirts
many centuries
her one tooth trembling welcome
and on her haired chin
a love-wart.

[tuppeny.livejournal.com]

Jane Yolen's book Things To Say To A Dead Man is pretty great collection of grief poems, I think.

I measure every grief... Emily Dickinson

[mirmusing.livejournal.com]

I measure every grief...

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.

The grieved are many, I am told;
The reason deeper lies,--
Death is but one and comes but once
And only nails the eyes.

There's grief of want, and grief of cold,--
A sort they call 'despair,'
There's banishment from native eyes,
In sight of native air.

And though I may not guess the kind
Correctly yet to me
A piercing comfort it affords
In passing Calvary,

To note the fashions of the cross
Of those that stand alone
Still fascinated to presume
That some are like my own.


- Emily Dickinson

[exceptindreams.livejournal.com]

"For Jane"
Charles Bukowski

225 days under grass
and you know more than I.
they have long taken your blood,
you are a dry stick in a basket.
is this how it works?
in this room
the hours of love
still make shadows.

when you left
you took almost
everything.
I kneel in the nights
before tigers
that will not let me be.

what you were
will not happen again.
the tigers have found me
and I do not care.

"For Jane: With All the Love I Had, Which Was Not Enough"
Charles Bukowski

I pick up the skirt,
I pick up the sparkling beads
in black,
this thing that moved once
around flesh,
and I call God a liar,
I say anything that moved
like that
or knew
my name
could never die
in the common verity of dying,
and I pick
up her lovely
dress,
all her loveliness gone,
and I speak to all the gods,
Jewish gods, Christ-gods,
chips of blinking things,
idols, pills, bread,
fathoms, risks,
knowledgeable surrender,
rats in the gravy of two gone quite mad
without a chance,
hummingbird knowledge, hummingbird chance,
I lean upon this,
I lean on all of this
and I know
her dress upon my arm
but
they will not
give her back to me.


"Alone"
Jack Gilbert

I never thought Michiko would come back
after she died. But if she did, I knew
it would be as a lady in a long white dress.
It is strange that she has returned
as somebody’s dalmatian. I meet
the man walking her on a leash
almost every week. He says good morning
and I stoop down to calm her. He said
once that she was never like that with
other people. Sometimes she is tethered
on the lawn when I go by. If nobody
is around, I sit on the grass. When she
finally quiets, she puts her head in my lap
and we watch each other’s eyes as I whisper
in her soft ears. She cares nothing about
the mystery. She likes it best when
I touch her head and tell her small
things about my days and our friends.
That makes her happy the way it always did.

There is also a beautiful anthology of quality poetry by well-known and some lesser-known (but still wonderful) poets called The Art of Losing: Poetry of Grief and Healing compiled by Kevin Young. I'd highly recommend you check it out if you're looking for striking poetry on grief.