#elegy poems on Hello Poetry

David Adamson Oct 2015

At night rise, to the buzz of my son’s blood,
I wake and blow aboriginal dust from my lungs,
Get up and take a turn around the house.

The place has gotten cold.
This ****-eyed family – good God, they are helpless.
I tried to help by leaving things behind,
Like this prayer on the wall
About the timelessness of beauty.
And did you find the poem
About Freud and mountain climbing?
All they do is wail privately
And try to pass it off as singing.

My son sleeps like a chessmaster,
Shocked into resignation.
He dreams about me,
And his dreams are riddled with light
And longing for the past.
Such nocturnal naiveté.

But he knows the stars
And because, like the ancient Greeks,
He can follow them home,
He will leave this place before it leaves him.

This house gets smaller all the time.
Still, the furniture breathes quietly,
And the dancers in the tapestry sway
Though faded by the sun.

The dust from my breath settles down in layers.
Pale light silvers the living room mirror.
My steps leave footprints before each foot falls.
The footprints lead back to my door.

It is time to lie down.
Soon my son will wake up,
And shake off the ashes of sleep.
I don't live here any more.
My death will begin again.

#dream #death #father #sleepwalking #elegy

Francie Lynch Sep 2015

Elegy for Dead Poets

When poets die
It's sad and true,
It matters not
What their bodies do,
The spirit flies
To Poet's Corner,
In Westminster Abbey.
You'll not see
Busts or inscriptions
For all the poets
Whose spirits linger
Alongside Chaucer, Browning, Spencer,
And a myriad of authors.
Dead Poet you have earned your share;
Dead Poet I will know you're there,
Composing in the Laureate's lair.

For all poets.

#poetscorner #elegy #deadpoet #westminsterabbey

Francie Lynch Sep 2015

If You Were a Love Poem

If I were to write you
A love poem
(this is only hypothetical),
So, let's pretend,
Like poets do.
Would you fit inside
The confines of a sonnet:
No, you're more free,
More like a breeze.
You're not ballad-like;
Though you could be
With those alluring green eyes.
I'd work on an ode
But you don't like heights.
We're not close enough for couplets, yet.
Free verse sounds like a fine fit.
You may end up being a muse someday
If I get the hang of it.
Most certainly when our elegy's written.

#poetry #writing #ode #ballad #lovepoem #elegy

David Adamson Aug 2015

Prayer for My Mother

(for Peggy, with Alzheimer’s, 1996)*

Absent spirit:
Soothe our hunger for consolation
In the presence of this woman
Who asks for none.

May the colored shapes we have become
Stand apart from these walls--
Where sun after sun has tiled
A catacomb of days--
Distinctly enough to radiate our love.

Banish our loss.
Dissolve the bitter mystery of why.
Forgive our numb embrace
That enfolds this slumping body
Whose eyes reflect glass,
Whose mind quests beyond a dark door
Searching for a land of lost names.

Give words to her passage.
Resolve the twisted path she must follow alone,
The cratered wastes she calls across,
Seeking a land of kindred beings with cognate powers
That name her as their own and exult.

#mother #alzheimers #elegy

David Adamson Jul 2015

What You Remember

You can’t really picture the place.
You don’t recall who was there.

But you remember surprise
That human ashes are not powdery dust,
Apt to disintegrate like snow,
Or soft like bread cast upon the waters.

Dad’s ashes chafed your palms like jagged seeds
As you clutched fistfuls from a plastic purple box
And flung them down a hillside
Somewhere in Little Cottonwood Canyon.

And you remember the feeling of urgency
As you retreated up the hill.
You had motions to go through,
Space to occupy,
A black and white landscape to walk
Among small figures filing along a dirt track
In the airless September heat.

#death #father #loss #family #grief #cremation #elegy #utah #scatteringashes

Seán Mac Falls Jul 2015

Rung to the Stars

— for Seamus Heaney*

Forging scaffold and wells of tongue,
Whose every word— rung to the stars,
One sprite, born a new heart to Ulster,
Tanged in sounds of the beating sparkle,
Now the leftover sun, a light in absence,
Falls with leaves of the turning autumn,
Tears, sloping, in a feathered arc, so fair,
Splitting to the shores of a western isle.

The Celtic Otherworld (orbis alius, so named after Lucan's account of the druidical doctrine of metempsychosis) is a concept in Celtic mythology, referring to an Otherworld such as a realm of the dead and a home of the deities or spirits.

Tales and folklore describe it as Fortunate Isles in the western sea, or at other times underground (such as in the Sídhe mounds) or right alongside the world of the living, but invisible to most humans.
.

#love #poetry #poet #spirit #elegy

Seán Mac Falls Jul 2015

True Love

.
We met
        On the wooden boards
Of the music
        Hall, in the fire
Glow of lights
        Dimmed and aflame.
A match was set,
        She was young
My eyes grew
        Wildly kissing her
And we lived
        Long in soft days
Held by the sea
        On Shanganagh
Cliffs, feral
        And green as Ireland
And for one
        Moment our eyes
Shut, caved in
        A day.  Now wood
Below, holds us
        In the casket
Of pine memory,
        Wrap of vines
Sharp wine of days
        Splendour
And in mournful
        Breeze, to these
We did surrender
        At a tomb
And silent grey birds
        Stood muttering
Where we both
        Are cold, grieving
Alone as we are
        Placing flowers.

#love #sorrow #joy #memory #youth #ireland #elegy

dc Jun 2015

elegy to my sleep

curled wrists folded within crumpled sheets
heartbeats gently flutter beneath my skin
drunk on dreams as I nestle
further and deeper into oblivion
however my mind is choking
mental reminders of things past
objectives to complete
work to be finished
I, bleary eyed, weary *****
assume a vacant mind
fixed to a beat body
mess of movements, mess of thoughts
3am is so unkind
to a lonely longing mind

#sleep #dreams #mental #wrists #oblivion #work #heartbeats #sheets #deprivation #elegy

Elaine Cosette Jun 2015

Remembrance of the perfect

Nothing can stop
the hot searing burn,
the shock of jumping into freezing water.
but worse,
instead of water, ice appears
and I hit it hard,
unexpectedly, everything cracks.
Surprise becomes hysteria,
and hysteria becomes aching,
aching regret for being
on the losing side of the contract.

The knit comes undone,
and I,
grasp onto these
remaining lose threads,
cant seem to get a hold of them,
I tangle them
and leave them under the bed
with other lost objects.
Little things to remind myself
of you.
A pin on a map
or smudges on the wall.

And when the loss
becomes unbearable,
I become unreachable.
Water can try to wash everything,
but the stain of tears,
the sensation of drowning,
never goes away.
Alone, and scared,
of losing contact,
and of losing remembrance
of the clear glass,
un-crackable
and untouched,
by anyone.

#sadness #loss #elegy

Francie Lynch Apr 2014

A Sapient Curriculum

The sun sits heavy on our lake.
There's much less to anticipate;
So much to communicate.
So let's reflect on our spectrum,
Our sapient human curriculum.

I

The sentient clod in Book One,
Sat up, cleaned up, pulled out his thumb.
With leafless Eve and fruitful tree
(made fertile with Theology)
Gave rise to Sociology.
Of all the ologies to appear,
Without this one we're not here.

Buy in, ward of tribal wrath.
Empathy's good for a sociopath.

II

To help our clans grow brave and strong,
Our gestures turned into whale song.
Those gutturals uttered shared found fire,
Pulled our heads from **** mire.
Did more for us than temple choirs.
Soon we make our first speech acts,
Labelling things, voicing contracts.
Our language was invented once
With radiance, with brilliance.
Its acquisition global,
Like math and music, universal.
Not to be learned, but inherent,
Foreboding dark and translucent.
With many voices we now relate,
And in conclusion end debate.
It really does sound quite absurd
To be seen and not heard.
So form good thoughts, speak good words.

Though our languages grew and spread,
By 2100 half are dead.

III

From our mud jambs and our stone,
We peaked, then said we're not alone.
Assumed a greater good than we
Placed us here and made us free.
Co-joined with divines we wait,
To resurrect... reincarnate...
(It's just too weird to transmigrate)
The ones who really take the cake
Are those that transubstantiate.
Beliefs now sculpted religious states
(The unknown makes one hesitate).
Thank goodness in our good will,
If caught we punish
(And still sadly ****).
Fear and guilt are base and column
Supporting deities we relied on.

We surely had ourselves in mind,
To create such gods we find unkind.

IV

We sought solutions to reality.
We love to hear our name.
To think within about oneself,
To think one can prove oneself
With statements of truth and belief.
We plied knowledge, values and existence,
To come to terms with our essence.
If you think, doubt and speak,
Know when to enter and delete;
Then rest assured you're not doomed;

dubito ergo cognito, ergo sum

V

The hub of sciences and controls
Mines our minds to open portals.
A discipline that aims to heal
Delusions of reality.
It delves deeply into our dreams,
Interpreting recurring themes.
Parsing perceptions and relations,
Our cognition and emotions.
Claiming reactions of fight or flight
Is our basest primate notion.
If you're seeking therapy
For life's complex journey,
Then heal thyself, and heal me.

Couch us in Psychology.

VI

In King James we're told history
Bound in ancient mystery.
The collected works of humanity
Were printed for our legacy.
One needs only read The Prodigal Son,
To know the course our literature's run.
Here read romance, greed and crime,
Erotica, adventure, The Divine.
Its cup spills with poetry,
Breaching the lip with poesy.
The best an author could produce.

The exception being Mother Goose.

VII

Our human/physical Geography
Unlocks our global complexity;
Unravels human comaraderie.

To really get it leave your hovel,
Pack your bags, make plans to travel.

VIII

Laws are made for governance,
With no excuse for ignorance.
Economy, society and politics,
Are codified by social ethics.
Crowding cells with amoral convicts.
Rules curb narcissistic needs
With civil and criminal equality.

To understand our civic censure,
Spot a cop in your rear view mirror.

IX

We've searched long, trying to explain,
Using Science, naming names.
Administering tests of redundancy
To master predictability.
Everything now seems Something-Science:
As if the hyphen empowers sapience.
But science isn't all that stable,
Its theories ever changing.
Strings now loop through everything.
The latest theories can't be grasped,
With ten dimensions moving fast,
Or moving slowly, shrinking, growing.

It seems we're really in the know!
Before Big Bang what ran the show?

X

From cave paintings to modernity,
Art projects humanity.
It's very good at teasing us
With abstracts feigning mimesis.
Does the artist need an audience
For his art to make some sense.
For art's sake accept the creed:

Ars Gratia Artis.
Are we agreed?

Afterward

What I learned from
Rock 'n Roll
Has helped divine
What I call soul

(As for *** and drugs?
Best left untold).

I'm just the boy that ran track,
Studied Shakespeare,
Read the stacks.
Did stand-up routines
In my class.

Those I love I endow
With all my love.
They know by now.

Don't get me wrong,
I'm aging great,
But there's so much to communicate.
So much to anticipate.

This may be an ongoing piece. There's so much to communicate.

#religion #science #music #philosophy #math #literature #english #history #psychology #elegy