Explore Poems: Funerals

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Respite
By Elane Kim
It’s New Year’s.
It’s New Year’s & the stars are white-hot & all your favorite dishes
are flushed warm on the island: tteokguk for fortune, knife-cut noodles
for longevity, persimmon pudding & a tin can of sardines.
The nectarines are in season in our...
Living
Death
Sorrow & Grieving
Relationships
Funerals
Today
By Victoria Chang
Jan.4.2022
A call is just a call. I pick it up.

Jan.6.2022
I lift blankets looking for my father.

Jan.7.2022
When I take off the patch, your eye is gone.
I spend the day in other people’s tears.

Jan.9.2022
Someone says your eyelid almost came off,
the doctors tried...
Love
Heartache & Loss
Nature
Living
Death
Health & Illness
Sorrow & Grieving
Time & Brevity
Relationships
Family & Ancestors
Funerals
Stanza Forms
Mixed
Meters
Free Verse
Techniques
Metaphor
Types/Modes
Ekphrasis
Grief
Melancholy & Despair
+ 14 more
Elegy for My Friend Who Was, among Other Things, an Orchestra Conductor
By Ben Purkert
A week apart, our birthdays
formed a bridge. They always fell

at the best time: snow over flowers
like thoughts scattered suddenly

over the phone. You want to know
his name? He was the beautiful friend,

the loudmouth, the one whose voice
shook the walls until the...
Living
Death
Relationships
Friends & Enemies
Funerals
Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night
By 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...
Living
Death
Sorrow & Grieving
Relationships
Family & Ancestors
Funerals
Verse Forms
Villanelle
Types/Modes
Elegy
+ 3 more
A Brown Girl Dead
By Countee Cullen
With two white roses on her breasts,
   White candles at head and feet,
Dark Madonna of the grave she rests;
   Lord Death has found her sweet.

Her mother pawned her wedding ring
   To lay her out in white;
She’d be so proud she’d dance and sing
   To...
Living
Death
Parenthood
Funerals
Verse Forms
Ballad
Grief
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...
Nature
Seas, Rivers, & Streams
Living
Death
Relationships
Family & Ancestors
Funerals
Stanza Forms
Rhymed Stanza
Techniques
Confessional
+ 4 more
Bede’s Death Song
By Bede
Fore there neidfaerae naenig uuiurthit
Religion
Christianity
Living
Death
Arts & Sciences
Philosophy
Farewells & Good Luck
Funerals
Toasts & Celebrations
Types/Modes
Epigram
+ 4 more
The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket
By Robert Lowell
I

A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket—
The sea was still breaking violently and night
Had steamed into our North Atlantic Fleet,
When the drowned sailor clutched the drag-net. Light
Flashed from his matted head and marble feet,
He grappled at the net
With the coiled,...
Nature
Seas, Rivers, & Streams
Social Commentaries
History & Politics
Religion
Christianity
God & the Divine
Living
Death
Sorrow & Grieving
Relationships
Family & Ancestors
Funerals
Stanza Forms
Couplet
Rhymed Stanza
Types/Modes
Elegy
Anxiety & Insecurity
Grief
+ 13 more
After great pain, a formal feeling comes – (372)
By Emily Dickinson
After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?

The Feet, mechanical, go round –
A Wooden way
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
Regardless grown,
A...
Nature
Living
Sorrow & Grieving
The Body
Funerals
I dwell in Possibility – (466)
By Emily Dickinson
I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –

Of Chambers as the Cedars –
Impregnable of eye –
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky –

Of Visitors – the fairest –
For...
Arts & Sciences
Philosophy
Reading & Books
Funerals
Of Glory not a Beam is left (1685)
By Emily Dickinson
Of Glory not a Beam is left
But her Eternal House –
The Asterisk is for the Dead,
The Living, for the Stars –
Living
Funerals
Sunday Morning
By Wallace Stevens

I

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of...
Religion
Christianity
Living
Death
Sorrow & Grieving
The Mind
Doubt & Contemplation
Time & Brevity
Funerals
Meters
Blank Verse
Anxiety & Insecurity
Gratitude
+ 6 more
O Captain! My Captain!
By Walt Whitman
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and...
Social Commentaries
Living
Death
Sorrow & Grieving
Mythology & Folklore
Heroes & Patriotism
Funerals
Types/Modes
Elegy
Grief
Being Oneself
Classics
+ 5 more
An Arundel Tomb
By Philip Larkin
Side by sideSide by side To see a recent photograph of this tomb of the Earl and Countess of Arundel that Larkin is describing, click here. , their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habitshabits Clothes ...
Love
Realistic & Complicated
Living
Death
Marriage & Companionship
Time & Brevity
Relationships
Men & Women
Arts & Sciences
Painting & Sculpture
Funerals
Stanza Forms
Rhymed Stanza
Types/Modes
Ekphrasis
+ 8 more
Sonnet 71: No longer mourn for me when I am dead
By William Shakespeare
No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world with vilest worms to dwell;
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand...
Love
Classic Love
Heartache & Loss
Realistic & Complicated
Romantic Love
Living
Death
Sorrow & Grieving
Relationships
Funerals
Verse Forms
Sonnet
+ 5 more
The Season of Phantasmal Peace
By Derek Walcott
Then all the nations of birds lifted together
the huge net of the shadows of this earth
in multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues,
stitching and crossing it. They lifted up
the shadows of long pines down trackless slopes,
the shadows of glass-faced towers down evening streets,
the...
Nature
Fall
Landscapes & Pastorals
Social Commentaries
Cities & Urban Life
Town & Country Life
Living
Time & Brevity
Farewells & Good Luck
Funerals
For All Ages
+ 4 more
Psalm 23
By Robert Alter
A David psalm.
    The LORD is my shepherd,
                              I shall not want.
    In grass meadows He makes me lie down,
                              by quiet waters guides me.
    My life He brings back.
                              He leads me on pathways of justice
                                             for His name's...
Nature
Landscapes & Pastorals
Religion
Christianity
God & the Divine
Judaism
Living
Funerals
For a Father
By Elise Partridge
Remember after work you grabbed our skateboard,
crouched like a surfer, wingtips over the edge;
wheels clacketing down the pocked macadam,
you veered almost straight into the neighbor's hedge?
We ran after you laughing, shouting, Wait!

Or that August night you swept us to the...
Living
Death
Parenthood
Time & Brevity
Relationships
Family & Ancestors
Arts & Sciences
Philosophy
Funerals
+ 2 more
Memorial
By Clifton Gachagua
To the young and able man who lets his death come in
with veils in his face that say you can come in and claim
a place among us. To the young man who closes his eyes
to the parting of clouds and...
Religion
God & the Divine
Living
Death
Sorrow & Grieving
Relationships
Family & Ancestors
Funerals
Types/Modes
Elegy
+ 3 more
Making a Fist
By Naomi Shihab Nye
We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.
—Jorge Luis Borges

For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert,...
Living
Death
The Body
The Mind
Doubt & Contemplation
Memory & Nostalgia
Relationships
Family & Ancestors
Activities
Travels & Journeys
Arts & Sciences
Philosophy
Funerals
Meters
Free Verse
Optimism
+ 9 more

p1Respite

p1Today

p1Elegy for My Friend Who Was, among Other Things, an Orchestra Conductor

p1Sunday Morning

Respite

Today

Elegy for My Friend Who Was, among Other Things, an Orchestra Conductor

Sunday Morning