death poems

Wow, too kewl! *smiles*

Stone Roses - How Do You Sleep - lyrics

I've seen your severed head at a banquet for the dead
All dressed up dinner, looked so fine
Your shining silver salver so tastefully powdered
With the finest military quick lime

Now try and picture this, as I gave you a kiss
The apple in your mouth slipped in mine
The orchestra played the sweetest serenade
We laughed as we put away your wine

So raise your glasses, here's a toast to wasted lives
May all their ghosts come back to haunt you
And tell you how they died

How do you sleep?
How do you last the night and keep the dogs at bay?
How do you feel when you close your eyes, and try and drift away?
Does it feel any better now?
Does it mean any more when the angel of death comes knock, knocking,
And banging at your door?

When all the fun was over, I put you on my shoulder
took you home, away from it all
Shot down and claimed, mounted and framed
Tastefully hung up on my wall
Are my dreams your nightmares? I hope they all come true
Get off your knees, the party's over
I'm coming home to you

How do you sleep?
How do you last the night and keep the dogs at bay?
How do you feel when you close your eyes, and try and drift away?
Does it feel any better now?
Does it mean any more when the angel of death comes knock, knocking,
And banging at your door, at your door?

"For certain is death for the born
And certain is birth for the dead;
Therefore over the inevitable
Thou shouldst not grieve."

"Stone Roses - How Do You Sleep" Good one Endy!

I Come and Stand at Every Door

I come and stand at every door
But no one hears my silent tread
I knock and yet remain unseen
For I am dead, for I am dead.

I'm only seven although I died
In Hiroshima long ago
I'm seven now as I was then
When children die they do not grow.

My hair was scorched by swirling flame
My eyes grew dim, my eyes grew blind
Death came and turned my bones to dust
And that was scattered by the wind.

I need no fruit, I need no rice
I need no sweet, nor even bread
I ask for nothing for myself
For I am dead, for I am dead.

All that I ask is that for peace
You fight today, you fight today
So that the children of this world
May live and grow and laugh and play.

Nazim Hikmet

THE LONG DEATH

for Wendy Teresa Simon
(25th September 1954 - 7th August 1979)


Radiation is like Oppression
the average daily kind of subliminal toothache
you get almost used to, the stench
of chlorine in the water, of smog in the wind.

We comprehend the disasters of the moment,
the nurding home fire, the river in flood
pouring over the sandbag levee, the airplane
crash with fragments of burnt bodies
scattered among the hunks of twisted metal,
the grenade in the marketplace, the sinking ship.

But how to grasp a thing that does not
kill you today or tomorrow
but slowly from the inside in twenty years.
How to feel that a corporate or governmental
choice means we bear twisted genes and our
grandchildren will be stillborn if our
children are very lucky.

Slow death can not be photographed for the six
oclock news. Its all statistical,
the gross national product or the prime
lending rate. Yet if our eyes saw
in the right spectrum, how it would shine,
lurid as magenta neon.

If we could smell radiation like seeping
gas, if we could sense it as heat, if we
could hear it as a low ominous roar
of the earth shifting, then we would not sit
and be poisoned while industry spokesmen
talk of acceptable millirems and ~O2
cancer per population thousand.

We acquiesce at murder so long as it is slow,
murder from asbestos dust, from tobacco,
from lead in the water, from sulphur in the air,
and fourteen years later statistics are printed
on the rise in leukemia among children.
We never see their faces. They never stand,
those poisoned children together in a courtyard,
and are gunned down by men in three-piece suits.

The shipyard workers who built nuclear
submarines, the soldiers who were marched
into the Nevada desert to be tested by the H-
bomb, the people who work in power plants,
they die quietly years after in hospital
wards- and not on the evening news.

The soft spring rain floats down and the air
is perfumed with pine and earth. Seedlings
drink it in, robins sip it in puddles,
you run in it and feel clean and strong,
the spring rain blowing from the irradiated
cloud Over the power plant.

Radiation is oppression, the daily average
kind, the kind youre almost used to
and live with as the years abrade you,
high blood pressure, ulcers, cramps, migraine,
a hacking cough you take it inside
and it becomes pain and you say, not
They are killing me but I am sick now.


Marge Piercy

MESSAGE FROM JOHN R. R. SEARL


The day will come before I die, that man on earth will not believe what they are reading.

Is it possible that there could be such people on our planet ?

What really worries me is that the number of followers who will follow those idiots will continue to grow.

Some of the things I expect these leaders of men will be telling the world, is that they suspect the ozone hole has always been there.

Their claims that if chlorofluorocarbons really destroy the ozone then there should be a hole over the factories that make it.

They no doubt will have never heard of the magnetic fields centred over the poles of this planet, not to mention the wind.

And should you ask these experts about the greenhouse effect, they will simply say there is no such thing.

Then when you ask them about the acid rain, they simple state that it is only one per cent of what it is claimed to be.

Surely there can be none so blind as those who do not wish to see, and when that is coupled with uninhibited greed, as no doubt it will be, then it will become a sad day for Mother Earth and her children.

For we truly are, the children of Mother Earth.

Perhaps I could do no better than recite for you a little poem, which says it all.


 
DEATH OF A PLANET

Our children are crying, hear what they say.
Don't take our tomorrow and throw it away.

Our planet is dying because you don't care.
With your misguided science you're polluting our air.

You cut too much forest for monetary gain.
The ground is so thirsty, no trees, mean no rain.

You've poisoned our oceans with filthy refuse.
Our fish, many are dying through senseless abuse.

Is this the inheritance you old ones will leave?
You are stealing our birthright, and for this we grieve.

We'll have no tomorrow unless you take heed.
And cease the destruction you cause by your greed.

So list' to our crying, and hear what we say.
Give back our tomorrow, take heed today.

Stop your pollution before it's too late.
Or we'll all have no future, but share the same fate.


 
If man could only grieve for this planet, as they did for Diana, there still could be a future for all of mankind.

Prof. John R. R. Searl

The Destiny of a Poet
By ZDENEK ROTREKL (born October 1, 1920 in BRNO)

The destiny of a poet, by the way, is to be
and not to be. Not to be, against all others,
and to be, with all the others.

To be and not to be.

He cannot, after all, say anything greater than
that he shall die, and that, in love, we should
have our seconds of dying. Those seconds of
non-dying between birth and death. He cannot
speak of anything greater than of death and of
apple blossoms' gentle fall. Of all things
leaving us and floating away just as he does.
Of movement and of pasing away being only
a ride in Charon's boat. Even Charon's boat
is and is not, even time is and is not.
Even life is and is not.

The destiny of a poet is just like that:

to be and not to be.

(From THE BOOK OF APOCRYPHA, MAGIC AND INCANTTIONS/
English Translation Copyright C 1990 by
Jirina Fuchsova.

Perhaps the most erudite from among the contemporary
Czech poets, Dr. Zdenek Rotrekl spent the years
1949 through 1962 in communist prison on trumped-up
charges ( received a death sentence initially,
later reduced to life in prison. He was fully
"rehabilitated" in 1962.)
Zdenek Rotrekl lives in Brno. He received the
JAN ZAHRADNICEK PRIZE FOR CZECH POETRY in
January 1991 (only one of many honors and
prizes he was honored with since 1990.)
JF



The Sedlec Ossuary (a.k.a. Kostnice) is a small Christian chapel decorated with human bones. It's located in Sedlec, which is a suburb in the outskirts of the Czech town Kutna Hora.

Amazing

ty for posting the frost poem.

i am an ass for not posting it myself b4.

Of course, it could just be some guy checking out the woods...

:-D

yeah ofcourse..

From WIlliam Carlos WIlliams, a small poem that is more appropriate than I care to think:

'The Hurricane'

The tree lay down
on the garage roof
and stretched, You
have your heaven,
it said, go to it.

A modern poem from Iraq


DEATH AND THE RIVER

By:- Badr Shakir al-Sayyab
Translated by:- Lena Jayyusi and Christopher Middleton

Buwayb
Buwayb

Bells of a tower lost in the sea bed
dusk in the trees, water in the jars
spilling rain bells
crystals melting with a sigh
`Buwayb ah Buwayb,"
and a longing in my blood darkens
for you Buwayb

river of mine, forlorn as the rain.
I want to run in the dark
gripping my fists tight
carrying the longing of a whole year
in each finger, like someone bringing you
gifts of wheat and flowers.
I want to peer across the crests of the hills,
catch sight of the moon
as it wades between your banks, planting shadows filling baskets
with water and fish and flowers.
I want to plunge into you, following the moon,
hear the pebbles hiss in your depths,
sibilance of a thousand birds in the trees.
Are you a river or a forest of tears?
And the insomniac fish, will they sleep at dawn?
And these stars, will they stop and wait
feeding thousands of needles with silk?

And you Buwayb .
I want to drown in you, gathering shells,
building a house with them, where the overflow
from stars and moon
soaks into the green of trees and water,
and with your ebb in the early morning go to the sea. For death is a strange world fascinating to children, and its door was in you, mysterious, Buwayb . Buwayb ah Buwayb.
twenty years have passed each one a lifetime.
And this day when the dark closes in,
when I lie still and do not sleep,
and listen with my conscience keen-a great tree reaching toward first light, sensitive
its branches, birds, and fruit-
I feel like rain the blood, the tears shed
Shed by the sad world;
my death bells ring and shake my veins,
and in my blood a longing darkens
for a bullet whose deadly ice
might plow through my soul in its depths, hell
setting the bones ablaze.
I want to run out and link hands with others in the struggle,
clench my fists and strike Fate in the face.
I want to drown in my deepest blood
that I may share with the human race its burden
and carry it onward, giving birth to life
My death
shall be a victory.

www.angelfire.com/nt/Gilgamesh/deathA.html


Peace,
Endy

Posted under another topic but good here as well:

the lesson of the moth
By Don Marquis, in "archy and mehitabel," 1927


i was talking to a moth
the other evening
he was trying to break into
an electric light bulb
and fry himself on the wires

why do you fellows
pull this stunt i asked him
because it is the conventional
thing for moths or why
if that had been an uncovered
candle instead of an electric
light bulb you would
now be a small unsightly cinder
have you no sense

plenty of it he answered
but at times we get tired
of using it
we get bored with the routine
and crave beauty
and excitement
fire is beautiful
and we know that if we get
too close it will kill us
but what does that matter
it is better to be happy
for a moment
and be burned up with beauty
than to live a long time
and be bored all the while
so we wad all our life up
into one little roll
and then we shoot the roll
that is what life is for
it is better to be a part of beauty
for one instant and then cease to
exist than to exist forever
and never be a part of beauty
our attitude toward life
is come easy go easy
we are like human beings
used to be before they became
too civilized to enjoy themselves

and before i could argue him
out of his philosophy
he went and immolated himself
on a patent cigar lighter
i do not agree with him
myself i would rather have
half the happiness and twice
the longevity

but at the same time i wish
there was something i wanted
as badly as he wanted to fry himself

archy

Jalal al-Din Rumi

Life & Death


look at love
how it tangles
with the one fallen in love

look at spirit
how it fuses with earth
giving it new life

why are you so busy
with this or that or good or bad
pay attention to how things blend

why talk about all
the known and the unknown
see how the unknown merges into the known

why think seperately
of this life and the next
when one is born from the last

look at your heart and tongue
one feels but deaf and dumb
the other speaks in words and signs

look at water and fire
earth and wind
enemies and friends all at once

the wolf and the lamb
the lion and the deer
far away yet together

look at the unity of this
spring and winter
manifested in the equinox

you too must mingle my friends
since the earth and the sky
are mingled just for you and me

be like sugarcane
sweet yet silent
don't get mixed up with bitter words

my beloved grows
right out of my own heart
how much more union can there be

come on sweetheart
let's adore one another
before there is no more
of you and me

a mirror tells the truth
look at your grim face
brighten up and cast away
your bitter smile

a generous friend
gives life for a friend
let's rise above this
animalistic behavior
and be kind to one another

spite darkens friendships
why not cast away
malice from our heart

once you think of me
dead and gone
you will make up with me
you will miss me
you may even adore me

why be a worshiper of the dead
think of me as a goner
come and make up now

since you will come
and throw kisses
at my tombstone later
why not give them to me now
this is me
that same person

i may talk too much
but my heart is silence
what else can i do
i am condemned to live this life

i've come again
like a new year
to crash the gate
of this old prison

i've come again
to break the teeth and claws
of this man-eating
monster we call life

i've come again
to puncture the
glory of the cosmos
who mercilessly
destroys humans

i am the falcon
hunting down the birds
of black omen
before their flights

i gave my word
at the outset to
give my life
with no qualms
i pray to the Lord
to break my back
before i break my word

how do you dare to
let someone like me
intoxicated with love
enter your house

you must know better
if i enter
i'll break all this and
destroy all that

if the sheriff arrives
i'll throw the wine
in his face
if your gatekeeper
pulls my hand
i'll break his arm

if the heavens don't go round
to my heart's desire
i'll crush its wheels and
pull out its roots

you have set up
a colorful table
calling it life and
asked me to your feast
but punish me if
i enjoy myself

what tyranny is this

you mustn't be afraid of death
you're a deathless soul
you can't be kept in a dark grave
you're filled with God's glow

be happy with your beloved
you can't find any better
the world will shimmer
because of the diamond you hold

when your heart is immersed
in this blissful love
you can easily endure
any bitter face around

in the absence of malice
there is nothing but
happiness and good times
don't dwell in sorrow my friend

Crossing the Bar

Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound or foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell;
When I embark;

For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson