Death Poetry And Quotes & Sayings

You will love again, people say. Give it time. Me with time
running out. Day after day of the everyday.
What they call real life, made of eighth-inch gauge.
Newness strutting around as if it were significant.
Irony, neatness and rhyme pretending to be poetry.
I want to go back to that time after Michiko's death
when I cried every day among the trees. To the real.
To the magnitude of pain, of being that much alive. — Jack Gilbert

...and when we die
we die alone
I cry, I cry alone
Like a piece of stone
I am thrown
into the wavy ocean of life
to atone...to atone
Only to atone... — Munia Khan

The Working Song
by Breton Braley

Oh, we're sick to death of the style of song
That's only a sort of a simpering song,
A kissy song and a sissy song
Or a weepy, creepy, whimpering song.
So give us a lift of a lusty song,
A boisterous, bubbling, boiling song,
Or a smashing song and a dashing song,
Oh, give us the tang of a toiling song,
The chanty loud of the working crowd,
The thunderous thrall of a toiling song!

Ay, sing us a joyous daring song,
Not a moaning, groaning, fretting song,
But a ringing song, and a swinging song,
A rigorous, vigorous, sweating song.
We have had enough of the gypsy song,
Which is only a lazy, shirking song,
So toughen your throat to a rougher note
And give us the tune of a working song,
A tune of strife and the joy of life,
The beat and throb of a working song! — Berton Braley

You only live twice:
Once when you are born
And once when you look death in the face — Ian Fleming

What is longevity? It is the horror of existing in a human body whose faculties are in decline. It is insomnia measured by decades and not by metal hands. It is carrying the weight of seas and pyramids, of ancient libraries and dynasties, of the dawns that Adam saw. It is being well aware that I am bound to my flesh, to a voice I detest, to my name, to routinely remembering, to Castilian, over which I have no control, to feeling nostalgic for the Latin I do not know. It is trying to sink into death and being unable to sink into death. It is being and continuing to be. — Jorge Luis Borges

I cried out for the pain of man,
I cried out for my bitter wrath
Against the hopeless life that ran
For ever in a circling path
From death to death since all began;
Till on a summer night
I lost my way in the pale starlight
And saw our planet, far and small,
Through endless depths of nothing fall
A lonely pin-prick spark of light,
Upon the wide, enfolding night,
With leagues on leagues of stars above it,
And powdered dust of stars below-
Dead things that neither hate nor love it
Not even their own loveliness can know,
Being but cosmic dust and dead.
And if some tears be shed,
Some evil God have power,
Some crown of sorrow sit
Upon a little world for a little hour-
Who shall remember? Who shall care for it? — C.S. Lewis

I fain would follow love, if that could be;
I needs must follow death, who calls for me;
Call and I follow, I follow! let me die. — Alfred Tennyson

When the lad for longing sighs,
Mute and dull of cheer and pale,
If at death's own door he lies,
Maiden, you can heal his ail.
Lovers' ills are all to buy:
The wan look, the hollow tone,
The hung head, the sunken eye,
You can have them for your own.
Buy them, buy them: eve and morn
Lovers' ills are all to sell.
Then you can lie down forlorn;
But the lover will be well. — A.E. Housman

How long your closet held a whiff of you,
Long after hangers hung austere and bare.
I would walk in and suddenly the true
Sharp sweet sweat scent controlled the air
And life was in that small still living breath.
Where are you? since so much of you is here,
Your unique odour quite ignoring death.
My hands reach out to touch, to hold what's dear
And vital in my longing empty arms.
But other clothes fill up the space, your space,
And scent on scent send out strange false alarms.
Not of your odour there is not a trace.
But something unexpected still breaks through
The goneness to the presentness of you. — Madeleine L'Engle

When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charact'ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love! - then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink. — John Keats

I have outlasted all desire,
My dreams and I have grown apart;
My grief alone is left entire,
The gleamings of an empty heart.
The storms of ruthless dispensation
Have struck my flowery garland numb,
I live in lonely desolation
And wonder when my end will come.
Thus on a naked tree-limb, blasted
By tardy winter's whistling chill,
A single leaf which has outlasted
Its season will be trembling still. — Alexander Pushkin

This world
that was our home
for a brief spell
never brought us anything
but pain and grief;
its a shame that not one of our problems
was ever solved.
We depart
with a thousand regrets
in our hearts. — Omar Khayyam

Love is Not All
Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

I begin my life. I live again. I meet a young girl called Valeria. She smiles easily. She laughs tender sounds that pull at my heart. I'm too young to be profound but she makes me feel so safe. So cherished. I am thirty years old. I bump into a woman I knew when she was a girl. Valeria looks annoyed to see me. She lives in the future. Where the world is turning. I live within the past. Where the people are trapped and screaming and alone. I live within the past when Valeria and I were in love. She's waiting for the cab to come, her foot tapping against the sidewalk. Her eyes glancing at her watch every few minutes. I'm eager to reunite our lives through some kind of friendship. I'm so eager to know her again, as she was when she was a child. But Valeria lives within the future. I live within the past. Have the two ever gotten along? Have they ever even met? — F.K. Preston

The bed we loved in was a spinning world
of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas
where we would dive for pearls. My lover's words
were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses
on these lips; my body now a softer rhyme
to his, now echo, assonance; his touch
a verb dancing in the centre of a noun.
Some nights, I dreamed he'd written me, the bed
a page beneath his writer's hands. Romance
and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste.
In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on,
dribbling their prose. My living laughing love -
I hold him in the casket of my widow's head
as he held me upon that next best bed.

- Anne Hathaway — Carol Ann Duffy

From the moon, the Earth is so small and so fragile, and such a precious little spot in that Universe, that you can block it out with your thumb. Then you realize that on that spot, that little blue and white thing, is everything that means anything to you - all of history and music and poetry and art and death and birth and love, tears, joy, games, all of it right there on that little spot that you can cover with your thumb. And you realize from that perspective that you've changed forever, that there is something new there, that the relationship is no longer what it was. — Rusty Schweickart

Through the darkest hours of the night
and through the dreamers realm I seek,
Far beyond the starry sky
and beyond galaxies I am free.
Through the grimmest memories
and past a seasons air I cannot breathe,
Far beyond this mortal world
in an afterlife we shall meet. — Lee Argus

A Parting Guest
What delightful hosts are they
Life and Love!
Lingeringly I turn away,
This late hour, yet glad enough
They have not withheld from me
Their high hospitality.
So, with face lit with delight
And all gratitude, I stay
Yet to press their hands and say,
Thanks. - So fine a time! Good night. — James Whitcomb Riley

I found the best thing
I could do
was just to type away
at my own work
and let the dying
die
as they always have. — Charles Bukowski

War, I have always said, forces men to change their standards, regardless of whether their country has won or lost. Poetics and philosophies disintegrate "when the trees fall and the walls collapse ". At the point when continuity was interrupted by the first nuclear explosion, it would have been too easy to recover the formal sediment which linked us with an age of poetic decorum, of a preoccupation with poetic sounds. After the turbulence of death, moral principles and even religious proofs are called into question. Men of letters who cling to the private successes of their petty aesthetics shut themselves off from poetry's restless presence. From the night, his solitude, the poet finds day and starts a diary that is lethal to the inert. The dark landscape yields a dialogue. The politician and the mediocre poets with their armour of symbols and mystic purities pretend to ignore the real poet. It is a story which repeats itself like the cock's crow; indeed, like the cock's third crow. — Salvatore Quasimodo

What is the world? What is it for?
It is an art. It is the best of all possible art, a finite picture of the infinite. Assess it like prose, like poetry, like architecture, sculpture, painting, dance, delta blues, opera, tragedy, comedy, romance, epic. Assess it like you would a Faberge egg, like a gunfight, like a musical, like a snowflake, like a death, a birth, a triumph, a love story, a tornado, a smile, a heartbreak, a sweater, a hunger pain, a desire, a fufillment, a desert, a waterfall, a song, a race, a frog, a play, a song, a marriage, a consummation, a thirst quenched.
Assess it like that. And when you're done, find an ant and have him assess the cathedrals of Europe. — N.D. Wilson

Final Disposition

Others divided closets full of mother's things.
From the earth, I took her poppies.
I wanted those fandango folds
of red and black chiffon she doted on,
loving the wild and Moorish music of them,
coating her tongue with the thin skin
of their crimson petals.

Snapping her fingers, flamenco dancer,
she'd mock the clack of castanets
in answer to their gypsy cadence.
She would crouch toward the flounce of flowers,
twirl, stamp her foot, then kick it out
as if to lift the ruffles, scarlet
along the hemline of her yard.

And so, I dug up, soil and all,
the thistle-toothed and gray-green clumps
of leaves, the testicle seedpods and hairy stems
both out of season, to transplant them in my less-exotic garden. There, they bloom
her blood's abandon, year after year,
roots holding, their poppy heads nodding
a carefree, opium-ecstatic, possibly forever sleep. — Jane Glazer

The will of life and death,
never share the same motivation ...
we all know that love is the ultimate motive to die for ...
but let's not kid ourselves ...
... we all know the ultimate motive to rise back from the dead is vengeance. — Non Nomen

Death is here and death is there,
Death is busy everywhere,
All around, within, beneath,
Above is death - and we are death.
Death has set his mark and seal
On all we are and all we feel,
On all we know and all we fear,
First our pleasures die - and then
Our hopes, and then our fears - and when
These are dead, the debt is due,
Dust claims dust - and we die too.
All things that we love and cherish,
Like ourselves must fade and perish;
Such is our rude mortal lot -
Love itself would, did they not. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Funeral Blues

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message 'He is Dead'.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good. — W. H. Auden

If I could find one word
that would shudder the air
like that frightened sob,
that wordless prayer
of my newly-born,
who drew one breath,
and with unopened eyes
sank back into death;
If I could break the world's cold heart
with that cry,
then this grief would lift
and I could die. — Kenneth L. Patton

And hence the poet must seek to be essentially anonymous,
He must die a little death each morning,
He must swallow his toad and study his vomit
as Baudelaire studied la charogne of Jeanne Duval. — Delmore Schwartz

People who are buried leave
Behind their memories.
People feel sad for them and
Worry, but for the living man,
They are never sorry.
This person, who is the sufferer,
Will never be able to withstand,
The chances snatched from him,
He thinks, "Am I under a ban?"
So he dies, and the world is
Forever in debt
For the man who faced
Death before his death. — Umera Ahmed

Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, every poem an epitaph. — T. S. Eliot

That day, that day when I can gaze at the sea
both of us calm
and I, trusting, having poured my whole heart into my Life Work ... when death
black waves!
no longer courts me and I can smile, constantly, at everything because, my bones, there will be so little of myself left to give it. — Juan Ramon Jimenez

Bright Star
Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors
No - yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever - or else swoon to death. — John Keats

If Death Is Kind
Perhaps if Death is kind, and there can be returning,
We will come back to earth some fragrant night,
And take these lanes to find the sea, and bending
Breathe the same honeysuckle, low and white.
We will come down at night to these resounding beaches
And the long gentle thunder of the sea,
Here for a single hour in the wide starlight
We shall be happy, for the dead are free. — Sara Teasdale

And at the closing of the day
She loosed the chain, and down she lay;
The broad stream bore her far away,
The Lady of Shallot. — Alfred Tennyson

There are no humans left. I should not be alone. I can't help but wonder that. There were so many of us living. But time started growing young four years ago. It isn't four years anymore. It's a number I wouldn't even be able to say. It feels like four years. It's trapped in my tender memory as four years. It's been an age. Multiple ages. It's been lifetimes; every single lifetime that used to exist. I remember my mother screaming. I recall the doctors naming me as nurses wiped away her blood and covered her face with white. The end of the play. It's been so long. Why am I alone? — F.K. Preston

Most Wicked Words!-Forbear to Speak Them Out

Most wicked words!-forbear to speak them out.
Utter them not again; blaspheme no more
Against our love with maxims learned from Doubt:
Lest Death should get his foot inside the door.
We are surrounded by a hundred foes;
And he that at your bidding joins our feast,
I stake my heart upon it, is one of those,
Nor in their councils does he sit the least.
Hark not his whisper: he is Time's ally,
Kinsman to Death, and leman of Despair:
Believe that I shall love you till I die;
Believe; and thrust him forth; and arm the stair;
And top the walls with spikes and splintered glass
That he pass gutted should again he pass. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

Why there isn't any drama in my life
So I'll crawl on the cottonfield with a fife
Why to have a dream in vain my life begs
Am a house gecko, I eat flies and lay eggs
My death surely doesn't yield a headline and all
I'll break law by pissing on a castle's wall
For my death there wouldn't be a weeping meni
From the name of Lady Canning there's ledikeni
One foot on heaven and one foot on hell, hanging
One cannon and two cannonballs dangling. — Nabarun Bhattacharya

I believe the death of Bobby Kennedy was in many ways the death of decency in America. I think it was the death of manners and formality, the death of poetry and the death of a dream. — Emilio Estevez

At the round earth's imagined corners blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go ;
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,
All whom war, dea[r]th, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you, whose eyes
Shall behold God, and never taste death's woe.
But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space ;
For, if above all these my sins abound,
'Tis late to ask abundance of Thy grace,
When we are there. Here on this lowly ground,
Teach me how to repent, for that's as good
As if Thou hadst seal'd my pardon with Thy blood.
— John Donne

My mother's death
changed the alchemy of food.
Holidays run together now
like ungrooved rivers. I forget
what they are for. I buy bakery goods.
They look dead
under the blue lights.
I don't do anything the way she taught me
but I get fat.
I don't look like her and I don't sound
like her, but I stand like her. — Florence Weinberger

I'm merely dying to be remembered for simply writing about my living memories — Michael Biondi

What is this slow blue dream of living,
and this fevered death by dreaming? — Aberjhani

Blossom

In April
the ponds open
like black blossoms,
the moon
swims in every one;
there's fire
everywhere: frogs shouting
their desire,
their satisfaction. What
we know: that time
chops at us all like an iron
hoe, that death
is a state of paralysis. What
we long for: joy
before death, nights
in the swale - everything else
can wait but not
this thrust
from the root
of the body. What
we know: we are more
than blood - we are more
than our hunger and yet
we belong
to the moon and when the ponds
open, when the burning
begins the most
thoughtful among us dreams
of hurrying down
into the black petals
into the fire,
into the night where time lies shattered
into the body of another. — Mary Oliver

Such is true joy's absolute certainty,
Its slow lit fuse that burns holes
In the shabby shroud of death forever. — Scott Hastie

Where, then, do we find the truth? We find it in the body, in the woods, in the water, in the soil. We find it in music, dance, and sometimes in poetry. We find it in a baby's face, and in the adult's face behind the mask. We find it in each other's eyes, when we look. We find it in an embrace, which is, when we feel into it, being to being, an incredibly intimate act. We find it in laughter and sobs, and we find it in the voice behind the spoken word. We find it in fairy tales and myths, and the tales we tell, even if fictional. Sometimes embroidering a tale enlarges it as a vehicle for the truth. We find it in silence and stillness. We find it in pain and loss. We find it in birth and death. — Charles Eisenstein

We stood up on two legs
And raised our heads above golden grass
He was there

We sharpened stone and steel
Used tools to harvest grass, beast and brother
He was there

We clustered together
In brick and mud swarming with rats and plague
He was there

We built nations and mistrust
Our fingers hovered over the red button
He smiled

Still we build
To rise above the golden grass
Away from the reach of his scythe

When he will harvest no more — Tim Seeley

The dead, Your Honor, do not agonize over their crimes and do not long to be happy, as you know. If from time to time we hear the opposite, then those are just trivial religious and poetical exaggerations and ridiculous rumors, which have nothing to do with the real circumstances of the simple dead. — Hassan Blasim

In medicine as well as in romantic poetry, it is the heart that is the center and controlling mechanics of life. If the heart stops, life stops. The loss of sight doesn't not mean death. Yet for ages, the eyes was believed to contain a human being's vital essence - a not wholly irrational belief. — Henry Grunwald

Siege

This I do, being mad:
Gather baubles about me,
Sit in a circle of toys, and all the time
Death beating the door in.

White jade and an orange pitcher,
Hindu idol, Chinese god, -
Maybe next year, when I'm richer -
Carved beads and a lotus pod...

And all this time
Death beating the door in. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

Hungry for beautiful words, the fox comes rooting around in the hedge, almost too close to the fire. He reads my mind with one glance and is gone.
All my poetry is now trotting around the bushes inside him, maybe some day to be partly eaten or left to rot. He understands being alive for as long as he can be, and does not worry about why, or what might happen afterwards. — Jay Woodman

Sonnet III: Black Coffin opened wide for all to See

Black Coffin opened wide for all to See,
The lifeless form of one I loved so dear.
O, listen! mournful knells that soon shall be
All night long tolling for the folk to hear.
The lanterns overlight the old churchyard
To watch the coffin lowered into the ground;
Soon Frost shall grasp the turf already hard,
Decay ye have to face without a sound.
But years have pass'd herein do I relate
My dear sweet mother's form within my mind.
Still happiness fills all my heart and state,
As I see my small family so kind.
Love cannot be withheld by death or grave,
It stays alive within the heart so brave. — Timothy Salter

So live, that when thy summons comes to join The innumerable caravan which moves
To that mysterious realm where each shall take His chamber in the silent halls of death, Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,Scourged by his dungeon; but, sustain'd and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.
Thanatopsis — William Cullen Bryant

When it over, I want to say:all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular,and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
from When the death comes — Mary Oliver

Dear friend, I have searched all night
through each burnt paper,
but I fear I will never find
the formula to let you die — Leonard Cohen

If I had another life
I would want to spend it all on some
unstinting happiness.
I would be a fox, or a tree
full of waving branches.
I wouldn't mind being a rose
in a field full of roses.
Fear has not yet occurred to them, nor ambition.
Reason they have not yet thought of.
Neither do they ask how long they must be roses, and then what.
Or any other foolish question. — Mary Oliver

They are both spectacular,
Life and death. — Dejan Stojanovic

At that moment Sonny noticed that the other car had not kept going but had parked a few feet ahead, still blocking his way. At that same moment his lateral vision caught sight of another man in the darkened tollbooth to his right. But he did not have time to think about that because two men came out of the car parked in front and walked toward him. The toll collector still had not appeared. And then in the fraction of a second before anything actually happened, Santino Corleone he knew he was a dead man. And in that moment his mind was lucid, drained of all violence, as if the hidden fear finally real and present had purified him. — Mario Puzo

If I Must Go
If I must go to heaven's end
Climbing the ages like a stair,
Be near me and forever bend
With the same eyes above me there;
Time will fly past us like leaves flying,
We shall not heed, for we shall be
Beyond living, beyond dying,
Knowing and known unchangeably. — Sara Teasdale

It is not possible, for a poet, writing in any language, to protect himself from the tragic elements in human life ... [ellipsis in source] Illness, old age, and death
subjects as ancient as humanity
these are the subjects that the poet must speak of very nearly from the first moment that he begins to speak. — Louise Bogan

I walk with a dual longing
for life and for death. — Melissa Lee-Houghton

Now that Karen has been resurrected, I can travel beyond the black mirror. I can discover who I have lost with the
floating hearts and severed heads of my medicine. I must now whisper my other friends back too. I'm sad they're gone ... sad and blue. — Nicholaus Patnaude

I don't know where I find the air and I keep getting the words wrong: From out our bourne of death and space the flood will wash me far- but it doesn't even matter. I never knew that words might not matter. — Ally Condie

I touch you knowing we weren't born tomorrow,
and somehow, each of us will help the other live,
and somewhere, each of us must help the other die. — Adrienne Rich

When I Am Dead, My Dearest
When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress-tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.
I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on, as if in pain:
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget. — Christina Rossetti

Anne Hathaway
The bed we loved in was a spinning world
of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas
where we would dive for pearls. My lover's words
were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses
on these lips; my body now a softer rhyme
to his, now echo, assonance; his touch
a verb dancing in the centre of a noun.
Some nights, I dreamed he'd written me, the bed
a page beneath his writer's hands. Romance
and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste.
In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on,
dribbling their prose. My living laughing love -
I hold him in the casket of my widow's head
as he held me upon that next best bed. — Carol Ann Duffy

If you had swum across the furthest ocean
And seen the vastness of infinity
Though dread of death might seize you, you'd still see
The rolling waves in never-ceasing motion
You'd still see something: Schools of dolphins swimming
Across the green and placid waters, skimming
The clouds, the sun and the moon, stars overhead -
You will see nothing in that void all round
You will not hear your footsteps where you tread
Beneath your feet, you'll feel no solid ground — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him ... a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create
so that
without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating. — Pearl S. Buck

If you want me again look for me under your boot soles. — Walt Whitman

Science ask facts and religion ask faith, humans are confused between life and death. — Santosh Kalwar

[H]e found poetry more comforting than Scripture - and his ability to forge from his life a cogent, powerful tale of living with death. — Paul Kalanithi

And after his death - or even before it, perhaps - he lived on in camp legend as a demented old man of seventy who had once written poetry in the outside world and was therefore nicknamed The Poet. And another old man - or was it the same one? - lived in the transit camp of Vtoraya Rechka, waiting to be shipped to Kolyma, and was thought by many people to be Osip Mandelstam - which, for all I know, he may have been. That is all I have been able to find out about the last days, illness and death of Mandelstam. Others know very much less about the death of their dear ones. — Nadezhda Mandelstam

The more formidable the contradiction between inexhaustible life-joy and inevitable fate, the greater the longing which reveals itself in the kingdom of poetry and in the self-created world of dreams hopes to banish the dark power of reality. The gods enjoy eternal youth, and the search for the means of securing it was one of the occupations of the heroes of mythology and the sages, as it was of real adventurers in the middle ages and more recent times ... But the fountain of youth has not been found, and can not be found if it is sought in any particular spot on the earth. Yet it is no fable, no dream-picture; it requires no adept to find it: it streams forth inexhaustible in all living nature. — Ferdinand Cohn

One doesn't even think of
the liver
and if the liver
doesn't think of
us, that's
fine. — Charles Bukowski

The power of the artform is stronger than stone, the poet says, and chooses the sonnet, a form concerned with argument and persuasion, to say so. This sonnet, he says, will last longer than any gravestone-and you'll be made shinier, brighter, by it. In this form it will-and therefore you will-avoid destruction by war, history, time generally; it'll even keep you alive after death; in fact it'll form a place for you to live, not die, where you'll be seen in the eyes of and the context of this love right to the end of time. — Ali Smith

Yet this thou art alive, but if ye soar,
My poor frail heart will have beat out its cry
And sadly miss thy sweet form all the more
While helplessly I stand and watch you die. — Timothy Salter

I grow into my death.
My life is small
and getting smaller. The world is green.
Nothing is all. — Mark Strand

My father's death when I was eighteen and his struggles as a Jewish immigrant provided me with the raw material, but for a long time I went from painting to fiction and then finally to poetry before I could find the right way of telling this story. — Philip Schultz

The potential biographies of those who die young possess the mystic dignity of a headless statue, the poetry of enigmatic passages in an unfinished or mutilated manuscript, unburdened with contrived or banal endings. — Anthony Powell

Even though I seem not human, a mute shelf

of glucose, bottled blood, machinery

to swell the lung and pump the heart - even so,

do not put out my life. Let me still glow. — Dudley Randall

I can't bear these accounts I read in the Times and elsewhere of these poetry slams, in which various young men and women in various late-spots are declaiming rant and nonsense at each other. The whole thing is judged by an applause meter which is actually not there, but might as well be. This isn't even silly; it is the death of art. — Harold Bloom

If you heard your lover scream in the next room
and you ran in and saw his pinkie on the floor, in a small puddle of blood.
You wouldn't rush to the pinkie and say,
'Darling, are you OK? '
No, you'd wrap your arms around his shoulders
and worry about the pinkie later.
The same holds true if you heard the scream,
ran in and saw his hand or -god forbid- his whole arm.
But suppose you hear your lover scream in the next room,
and you run in and his head is on the floor next to his body.
Which do you rush to and comfort first? — Jeffrey McDaniel

Poetry will exist as long as there is a problem of life and death — Ruben Dario

Four years ago the clocks started turning back. I open my eyes and see nothing. I feel nothing below or above me. I feel the absence of things. The absence of my flesh, my bones, my body, my mind. All that is left is awareness. I see nothing but the absence of colour. It's not a black darkness. It's simply nothing. The interior of a black hole. I recall news of a black hole lingering along the edges of our solar system. All that time ago. Four years ago. When the clocks started turning back. I hear nothing. Until there is a something. A small thing. A voice. I listen. There are more voices. The sounds are human. How long has it been since I've heard a human? The sounds scratch along my now present attention. They carve into my hearing. They are horrid, wretched things. Voices screaming. Growing loud and desperate. How many voices? Billions. This is the birth of our species. We are born screaming. It's all we know to do. We have screamed for eternity. Within this empty space. — F.K. Preston

Nature is bent on new beginning
and death has not a chance of winning ... — Rosy Cole

Remember
Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more, day by day,
You tell me of our future that you planned:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad. — Christina Rossetti

Angela had never really got on with modern poetry. Even stuff like Seamus Heaney, Death of a Naturalist and the other book. He seemed such a lovely man and she really did try, but it sounded like prose you had to read very slowly. Old stuff she understood. Rum-ti-tum. Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white ... Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack ... Something going all the way back. Memorable words, so you could hand it down the generations. But free verse made her think of free knitting or free juggling. This, for example. She extracted a book at random. Spiders by Stanimir Stoilov, translated by Luke Kennard. She flipped through the pages ... the hatcheries of the moon ... the earth in my father's mouth. — Mark Haddon

they told her, "fear the reaper."
she laughed to herself and muttered, 'baby, death ain't nothing' more than a quick fuck.
a little bit of silence after he comes. — Taylor Rhodes

And I am weary of the anguish
Increasing winters bear;
Weary to watch the spirit languish
Through years of dead despair.
So, if a tear, when thou art dying,
Should haply fall from me,
It is but that my soul is sighing,
To go and rest with thee. — Emily Bronte

I go to the shelf and pick out a few poetry books to take with me. A few old favorites and a few I haven't gotten to yet. As I slip the books into my carry-on, it occurs to me that there really are a lot of poems about death, that I've always read many poems about dying, but had almost never noticed them before. They were always the ones I lightly skimmed, and I thought that maybe I could start reading these poems more carefully. It was almost nothing, but it was also a decision about my life. — Jacob Wren

I Have Loved Hours at Sea
I have loved hours at sea, gray cities,
The fragile secret of a flower,
Music, the making of a poem
That gave me heaven for an hour;
First stars above a snowy hill,
Voices of people kindly and wise,
And the great look of love, long hidden,
Found at last in meeting eyes.
I have loved much and been loved deeply
Oh when my spirit's fire burns low,
Leave me the darkness and the stillness,
I shall be tired and glad to go. — Sara Teasdale

I've been very influenced by folklore, fairy tales, and folk ballads, so I love all the classic works based on these things
like George Macdonald's 19th century fairy stories, the fairy poetry of W.B. Yeats, and Sylvia Townsend Warner's splendid book The Kingdoms of Elfin. (I think that particular book of hers wasn't published until the 1970s, not long before her death, but she was an English writer popular in the middle decades of the 20th century.)
I'm also a big Pre-Raphaelite fan, so I love William Morris' early fantasy novels.
Oh, and "Lud-in-the-Mist" by Hope Mirrlees (Neil Gaiman is a big fan of that one too), and I could go on and on but I won't! — Terri Windling

even in death, his last breath was poetry
existing in the wind
and on the breeze of
"it used to be likes"
forever remembering,
yet never reliving
his life
will never be what it used to be like. — N'Zuri Za Austin

We are burning like a chicken wing left on the grill of an outdoor barbecue
we are unwanted and burning we are burning and unwanted
we are
an unwanted
burning
as we sizzle and fry
to the bone
the coals of Dante's 'Inferno' spit and sputter beneath
us
and
above the sky is an open hand
and
the words of wise men are useless
it's not a nice world, a nice world it's
not ... — Charles Bukowski

Ars Poetica

To gaze at the river made of time and water
And recall that time itself is another river,
To know we cease to be, just like the river,
And that our faces pass away, just like the water.

To feel that waking is another sleep
That dreams it does not sleep and that death,
Which our flesh dreads, is that very death
Of every night, which we call sleep.

To see in the day or in the year a symbol
Of mankind's days and of his years,
To transform the outrage of the years
Into a music, a rumor and a symbol,

To see in death a sleep, and in the sunset
A sad gold, of such is Poetry
Immortal and a pauper. For Poetry
Returns like the dawn and the sunset.

At times in the afternoons a face
Looks at us from the depths of a mirror;
Art must be like that mirror
That reveals to us this face of ours. — Jorge Luis Borges

Like two old philosophers, Ashvin and James spoke of the ruin of their lives, their unfulfilled needs, their unanswered prayers and ultimately they were seduced by the phantom call to death by suicide its science, its poetry, its violence, its art. — Peter Akinti

In The Land of Poetry and Fighting, Efficiency rules the throne. I try to live here, so I shave my head because hair is dead and dead is inefficient. — Cameron Conaway

he inadvertently opened the door to a storeroom on the station and found it full of aircrew uniforms on hangers. He thought they must be replacement issue until he looked more closely and saw the brevets and stripes and ribbon medals and realized they had come off the bodies of the dead and injured. The empty uniforms would have provided a poetic image if he hadn't more or less relinquished poetry by then. — Kate Atkinson

In crime and enmity they lie
Who sin and tell us love can die,
Who say to us in slander's breath
That love belongs to sin and death. — John Clare

as long as there are
human beings about
there is never going to be
any peace
for any individual
upon this earth (or
anywhere else
they might
escape to).

all you can do
is maybe grab
ten lucky minutes
here
or maybe an hour
there.

something
is working toward you
right now, and
I mean you
and nobody but
you. — Charles Bukowski

I have the idea that lyric poetry is a poetry that's driven by a sense of the presence of death. That there's something unbearable about the fact that we're going to die and that we can't stand it and I think you find that out in childhood and you don't really - at least I found it out in childhood and I found it hard to get over. — Edward Hirsch

Come, said my Soul
Such verses for my Body let us write, (for we are one,)
That should I after death invisibly return,
Or, long, long hence, in other spheres,
There to some group of mates the chants resuming,
(Tallying Earth's soil, trees, winds, tumultuous waves,)
Ever with pleas'd smiles I may keep on,
Ever and ever yet the verses owning - as, first, I here and now,
Signing for Soul and Body, set to them my name, — Walt Whitman