Tag: death

Do Not Stand At My Grave And Weep By Mary Elizabeth Frye

Do not stand at my grave and weep,

I am not there; I do not sleep.

I am a thousand winds that blow,

I am the diamond glints on snow,

I am the sun on ripened grain,

I am the gentle autumn rain.

When you awaken in the morning’s hush

I am the swift uplifting rush

Of quiet birds in circling flight.

I am the soft starlight at night.

Do not stand at my grave and cry,

I am not there; I did not die.

 

I don’t remember the first time I came across this poem. But it made me sit up and take notice. Then, that first time around, I remember saving it as drafts in my mailbox (an ancient and anti-tech savvy thing to do, I know!). I even remember sending it to friends or at least putting it down as a to-do. Interesting as this is, I am 200% sure, I googled it and lapped up it’s wiki. There was an interesting story, badly retold by me here: the poetess wrote it to console someone who had lost their someone. She wrote it randomly on some brown paper bag and that was it. She was never a poet and was “discovered” by one of those perky little people going around looking for origins. You should just google this for a more accurate version.

Anyway, since then, this poem has come back to me so many times, through so many different media that I am beginning to find it creepy. I need someone to know that I’ve seen this and that it keeps coming back to me, repeatedly. There, it’s out of my system!

That’s all, really.

Life

Butterflies flit

Leaving shivering leaves in their wake

Water drips tense like sweat

And air holds its breath

Willing all noise to quiet down

 

I did notice earlier

And I am wondering now

Did they pre-empt my condition?

 

Contrary to popular belief

Pointlessness is a calm feeling

Only negative.

The loneliness, solid in its intensity

Weighs me down, its lead boots to my head

 

White noise funnels into me

Hollowing out instead of filling

The certainty, the singleness

Of that settling sadness

Like drying concrete.

 

My world zooms into my loneliness

It is fade out for everything else.

It is nothing more than a feeling

My feeling, because outside I see

I see the world go on around me

 

Go on like nothing changed

And my life, the entirety of my years

Compresses into a lead ball, the size of a pill

Heady with side effects.

 

It makes my tongue thick

And my voice echo

It twists my legs and hurts my throat.

I feel everything and then suddenly

Nothing.

 

I look around and I recognise afterlife

But sadly for you its

“Authorised Personnel Only” from here on.

 

Perfection

The cynicism in my blood cannot deny that I’ve experienced perfection.

The ease with which I can complete his sentences, without a wasted breath, as if it were the same mouth uttering them words.

The balance that keeps my grandparents married has to be Perfection. If she were any less deaf or he blind to her devotion, they would long have battled out of the bedroom.

The blanket that wraps us when Amma matches my curves in sleep. A knowledge that no one else can possess of every cell that shapes me. Because they were her own before me.

The smoke that twirls seductively into my lungs from that distant first drag; lone and potent perfection, your express ticket out of this world.

When the mouse walks straight into the trap, welcoming its death, the time has come for Perfection.

The simplicity that is fish curry, dead fish swimming in their private spiced sea. Its earthiness remembers the sea and I weep for the sea the fish miss.

What else is the column of hollering monsoon that takes me in from the noise in my head if not Perfection?

It was ingenuity that brought me Perfection that I never sought. In a foreign land where English paraded out of mouths and where English was the only language between us, we took to our mother tongues. Tongues, yes plural, different; languages that we did not share. We spoke thus, in two tongues when knowledge, a lost boy, was vying to be found. While our tongues mouthed coherent syllables, our ears replied to senseless mouthfuls thrown at us from the other. Our understanding wasn’t tongue deep. In the ungainly comments we spouted at passersby, we didn’t speak or hear each other. We were being each other. She and I were, in that moment, two friends, perfectly in tune, when no words made  sense and we recognised Perfection.

Maybe We Have Time By Pablo Neruda Translated By Alastair Reid

Maybe we still have time

to be and to be just.
Yesterday, truth died
a most untimely death,
and although everyone knows it,
they all go on pretending.
No one has sent it flowers.
It’s dead now and no one weeps.

Maybe between grief and forgetting,
a little before the burial,
we will have the chance
of our death and our life
to go from street to street,
from sea to sea, from port to port,
from mountain to mountain,
and, above all, from man to man,
to find out if we killed it
or if other people did,
if it was our enemies
or our love that committed the crime,
because now truth is dead
and now we can be just.

Before, we had to battle
with weapons of doubtful caliber
and, wounding ourselves, we forgot
what we were fighting about.
We never knew whose it was,
the blood that shrouded us,
we made endless accusations,
endlessly we were accused.
They suffered, we suffered,
and when they at last won
and we also won,
truth was already dead
of violence or old age.
Now there is nothing to do.
We all lost the battle.

And so I think that maybe
at last we could be just
or at last we could simply be.
We have this final moment,
and then forever
for not being, for not coming back.

Funeral Blues By W.H. Auden

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 for ever: 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.

The Day I Live To See

I lay quite quiet,
still and motionless,
eyes laze floating thither
brain crouches working overtime.

Don’t breathe and
this too shall pass.
This life, this life that
I live in as if on rent.

Lay low enough and a day will come
When no one will notice
When no one will remember
When no one will care
Who I was and other details

That is the day I live to see.

The Life And Death Of A Dream

There has always been a peaceful turquoise dream. A permanent dream of having a person of one’s own.
A person for whom one is most special. Of being someone’s that special person.

Elaborate details of being someone’s reason for living had been sketched and re-sketched a thousand times over. Right through all this idle imagining there was an understanding that this was a dream, just a dream; an impossible indigo dream.

Implausible: stacked like audience in a theatre; having wilfully suspended disbelief; enjoying the performance. Though the longing for such a person was palpable, never once was it imagined that this royal blue dream would come into acquaintance with reality.

The dream turned a questioning shade of blue this May. Summer was blamed for the strange colour change. It took a while to reckon that the darling dream was being eaten.

Eaten whole by a nerd.

On stage the blue dream was losing colour like a 2x rewind of liquid blue in water. The spotlight switched automatically to the weirdo who stood up from his seat. Simple and regular like any other, this psycho stood.

The dream, now faintly blue, was lost for clues as to why this was happening to it. The blue dream was supposed to be eternal. Audience sleepwalked towards the exit as if the titles had scrolled. They seemed to know better. They seemed to have known all along.

On that fateful day, the dream had met Neirdpsy, the slayer of blue dreams. This blue dream grew pale, for having met the prototype of reality. He had no use for this happy blue dream because it wasn’t his to live.

As the dream lay on stage being progressively de-blued, ‘All dreams die’, waltzed the music notes. Though the spirited dreamer who gave it life would dearly be missed, this was like the limitless blue sky for the dream; Neirdpsy was here with a possibility of a real life for the dreamer.

Devoid of all hints of its blueness, the dream knew it had to die, the time had come for this blue dream to give way to a differently coloured reality.