When a friend or family member dies, sometimes the power of words can help you express your grief—whether you're religious or not. Of course, the Bible, Quran, Talmud, or whatever religious text you believe in can offer words of comfort and honesty about what you are going through, but for those of you who may not belong to a church or other group Say, there are non-religious poems about losing a loved one who could have helped.
These secular poems can help you during your private time of grief, or they can add meaningful content to a funeral or memorial service. In a way, if you're struggling to find the words to celebrate the life of a loved one, or to explain the complex emotions you feel during this struggle, a poet can find the words for you. Whether you've lost your best friend, your mother, your child, or any other close person in your life, there's probably a suitable poem or text that sums up your emotions.
Classic poets such as WH Auden, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Emily Dickinson, as well as new contemporary poets such as Penelope Sawtelle and Kevin Young, have written about the loss of a loved one of powerful poetry. Hopefully you can find some peace or serenity in their verses.
1. "But Not Forgotten" by Dorothy Parker
I think no matter where you are lost, I will accompany you for a while. Though you may wander in sweeter lands, you won't soon forget my hands, or the way I held my head, or all the trembling things I said. You will still see me, small, white, smiling, and feel my arms around you in the secret nights when the day flies again. I think that wherever you are, you will keep me in your memory, preserve my image where there is no me, by telling later love about me.
2. "No. 101 (On the Death of His Brother)" by Gaius Valerius Catullus
By far and distant streams, brother, I come to your sorrowful graveside, that I may give the dead a last gift, and negotiate in vain with your ashes in silence: for she now gives and now denies Hath ta'en you, Unfortunate brother, in my eyes. But look! These gifts, heirlooms of days gone by, Are made into sad things to adorn your coffin; receive them, all soaked with brother's tears, And, brother, forever, hail and farewell!
3. "Change of Address" by Donal Dempsey
You don't die you just change shape
Invisible to the naked eye
Became so sad
its clarity is more realistic
than your existence
before you separate from yourself
now you are part of me
you are deep in my heart
I call you by your new name
"Sad...sad!"
Even though I still call you "love".
4. Scattering by Penelope Soule
I throw you into the water. Is it a lake or a random moon.
Be the first light and raise its beggar's cup.
I scatter your ashes. Be the gale teaching autumn to correct its ways, or the leopard being proud of his spotted fur.
Become a mentor to the Sakura Tree.
I scatter your dust in all directions, like the seed sown by the sower: wild rose, tiberium, or the almighty.
Descending like a silver mine, never seen, deep in the lynx-eyed earth.
Like a barn owl white as dusk; a dove or a crow marvels at his flight. Learn about the different pleasures.
5. "Epitaph for a Friend" by Robert Burns
Here rests an honest man, friend of mankind, friend of truth, friend of age, guide of youth: few have such hearts as his, warm with virtue, few have heads so rich in knowledge; if there be another A world where he lives in bliss; if not, he does his best.
6. "Funeral Blues" by WH Auden
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephones, stop the barking of the dogs with a juicy bone, silence the piano, carry out the coffin with the sound of a low drum and let the mourners come.
Let the planes groan and circle overhead, writing the message "He's dead" across the sky. Put a crepe bow around the white neck of the public pigeon and have the traffic police wear black cotton gloves.
He was my north, my south, my east and west, my work week and my Sunday off, my noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought love would last forever :I was wrong.
Don't want the stars now; kill them all, pack up the moon, tear down the sun, dump the oceans, sweep away the wood; for there is nothing that can do any good now.
7. "Honey" by Jackie Kay
You might forget the exact sound of her voice, or the look of her face as she slept. You might forget the sound of her quiet cries, curled up into a half-moon,
When younger than she was, she seemed to be leaving. Before she left, when the flowers were blooming on the trees, the sun was out, and everything seemed right with the world. I held her hand and sang a song from my childhood——
Hooray, boys, let her go boys , when I stopped singing, she had slipped away, already a girl's slip, skipping away, her heart light, her face almost smiling.
What I didn’t know or see at the time was that she wasn’t really gone. Dear people, the dead don’t leave until you do. The dead still hold our hands.
8. "Redemption Song" by Kevin Young
Autumn is finally here, finally, the mist, the haze of heat, we wake up
the past few weeks with
Dismissed. we discover
We feel a chill, a light feeling, and we embrace ourselves. Frost turns the ground gray.
Grief might be easy without such beauty - simpler if silver
The maple tree did not throw its leaves into the flames, believing that spring would find it again.
It might be easier if not a song still lifted us up, if the wind didn't bother us anymore
My heart is like water. I half expected to see you filling the autumn air like a breath-
I sleep with my fists clenched at night and during the day I'm like a kid on the playground
Falling down, crying, not crying so much because of pain
Surprisingly. I'm tired of the tide
Take you away and come back again - worse yet, forget or that
You can't forget. Not Yet – Last Summer’s Cricket Chorus
became quiet.
9. "Bread and Music" by Conrad Aiken
The music I heard with you was more than music, the bread I broke with you was more than bread; now without you, everything is desolate; everything that was once so beautiful is dead.
Your hands have touched this table and this piece of silver, and I've seen your fingers hold this glass. These things do not remember you, my dear, but your touch on them does not disappear. For you have moved my heart among them, blessing them with your hands and your eyes. In my heart they will always remember - they once knew you, oh beauty and wisdom.
10. “Grief” by Stephen Dobbins
Trying to remember you is like me walking a long way through the sand with water in my hands. People are waiting somewhere. They haven't had any alcohol in days.
Your name was the food on which I lived; now my mouth is filled with dirt and ashes. Say your name and be surrounded by feathers and silk; now, reaching out, I touch glass and wire. Your name is the thread that connects my life; now I'm a splinter on the tailor's floor.
I was dancing when I learned of your death; may my feet be separated from my body.
11. "Cold" by Carol Ann Duffy
It felt so cold, that snowball crying in my hand, as I rolled it in the snow, it grew until I could sit on it and look back at the house, when I woke up in my room When I arrived, the windows were shuttered and it was so cold that my breath stripped me of my clothes in the air. It was cold too, hugging the snowy torso I had built with my arms to build a snowman, my toes burning in my winter boots, cold; my mother’s voice calling me in the cold. Her hands were cold from peeling and then dipping the potatoes into the bowl, pausing to touch her daughter's face and kiss her cold cheek and my cold nose. But there is nothing colder than the February night when I opened the door of the resting church where my mother was lying. Not young, not old, I kissed her forehead back with my lips, knowing the meaning of cold.
12. "Time Will Bring No Relief" by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Time does not bring relief; you all lied who told me that time would ease my pain! I miss him when I cry in the rain; I want him when the tide goes out; the old snow on the mountainside has melted, and last year's leaves have turned into smoke in the alley; but last year's bitter love must still be piled on my heart, I The old thoughts still exist. There were a hundred places I didn't dare go - so they filled his memory. As I was relieved to enter some quiet place where his feet never fell and his face was never illuminated, I said, "There is no memory of him here!" So shocked, so remembered.
13. "Don't Go Gentle into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas
Do not go gentle into that good night, old age should burn and rage at the end of the day; rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Although the wise know in the end that the darkness is right, for their words do not fork lightning, they will not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, as the last wave passes, cry out how bright their frail deeds may dance in the green bay, rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild people catch and sing the sun in flight, and learn, too late, that they grieve the sun on the way, not to go gentle into that good night.
Serious people, on the verge of death, see with dazzling vision. Blind eyes can shine like shooting stars, and are happy, angry, and angry against the passing of the light. And you, my father, in the height of sorrow, cursed, now with your ferocity bless me with tears, I pray. Don't go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light
14. “A Buzz in the House” by Emily Dickinson
The noise in the house on the morning after death is the most solemn thing on earth.
Clean the soul and put away the love we don’t want to use again until eternity.
Image: Public domain image/Pixabay; Sebastian Pichler , Przemysław Sakrajda, Trina Christian , Volkan Olme z/Unsplash
