Funeral Poems Quotes

You listen to people, you listen so deeply that you can hear their past lives,
The crackle of their funeral pyres, ~ Dick Allen

It took me 14 years to write poems about Vietnam. I had never thought about writing about it, and in a way I had been systematically writing around it. ~ Yusef Komunyakaa

He listened some more; then he come tiptoeing down and stood right between us; we could a touched him, nearly. Well, likely it was minutes and minutes that there warn't a sound, and we all there so close together. There was a place on my ankle that got to itching, but I dasn't scratch it; and then my ear begun to itch; and next my back, right between my shoulders. Seemed like I'd die if I couldn't scratch. Well, I've noticed that thing plenty times since. If you are with the quality, or at a funeral, or trying to go to sleep when you ain't sleepy - if you are anywheres where it won't do for you to scratch, why you will itch all over in upwards of a thousand places. Pretty soon Jim says: ~ Mark Twain

Every 30 seconds, it transmitted portions of [a Chopin Polonaise] to tell the world that the capital was still in Polish hands. Angered by the unexpected setback, the German High Command decided to pound the stubborn citadel into submission. In round-the-clock raids, bombers knocked out flourmills, gasworks, power plants and reservoirs, then sowed the residential areas with incendiaries. One witness, passing scenes of carnage, enumerated the horrors: 'Everywhere corpses, wounded humans, dead horses . . . and hastily-dug graves.' . . . Finally food ran out, and famished Poles, as one man put it, 'cut off flesh as soon as a horse fell, leaving only the skeleton.' On September 28, Warsaw Radio replaced the polonaise with a funeral dirge.15 ~ Norman Davies

Silence explains a lot of things.
It tells us why people are who they not supposed to be.
It's the fear of being afraid.
It's because of their own safety.
Sometimes it becomes an unexplainable feeling.
It shows the insecureties, acceptation, love and vulnerability
inside everyone of us. ~ Tessa Vanluchene

I was saved in a shabby little motel room. Of course, you don't have to be in a church to be saved. After all, you're probably not going to die in a funeral home. It's convent if you do, but it probably won't happen. ~ Robert Morris

...believing in the magic of life, the power of hope, the cosmic sanity of chance and change, and the unmistakable power of love. ~ Kris Radish Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral Pg. 297

Robert Conquest once suggested that 'a curious little volume might be made of the poems of Stalin, Castro, Mao and Ho Chi Minh, with illustrations by A. Hitler. ~ Martin Amis

(Page 288)
If my love were an ocean,
there would be no more land.
If my love were a desert,
you would see only sand.
If my love were a star-
late at night, only light.
And if my love could grow wings,
I'd be soaring in flight.
-I love poetry so getting to read something as tiny as this was very refreshing. I think I can relate to Hannah because what she is essentially saying is that she loves a lot to the point that if her love were an object in this world.. the entire world would be consumed by it just to show the amount of love she has. It got me confused because I found it kind of selfish of Hannah writing that poem because if she loved everone as deeply as her poems depict.. why would she leave them? ~ Jay Asher

If the poem is so moving that even if you have no experience in that particular setting be it 1920's Harlem let's say. You still are so moved that you can put yourself in that position. That means that the writer has managed to go beyond the personal and touch the humanity in all of us and it's really a blast to read it because I realize how that this does hold true for the truly great poems. ~ Rita Dove

Instead of imitating me, you simply loiter. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

I stopped going to therapy
because I knew my therapist was right
and I wanted to keep being wrong.
I wanted to keep my bad habits
like charms on a bracelet.
I did not want to be brave.
I think I like my brain best
in a bar fight with my heart.
I think I like myself a little broken.
I'm ok if that makes me less loved.
I like poetry better than therapy anyway.
The poems never judge me
for healing wrong. ~ Clementine Von Radics

Your poems are of interest to mankind; your liver isn't. Drink till you write well and feel sick. Bless your poems and be damned to you. ~ Fernando Pessoa

Break open
A cherry tree
And there are no flowers;
But the spring breeze
Brings forth myriad blossoms. ~ Ikkyu

The poet can only write the poems; it takes the reader to complete the meaning. ~ Nikki Giovanni

There are no honest poems about dead women. ~ Audre Lorde

Sometimes he would advise me to read poetry, and would send me in his letters quantities of verses and whole poems, which he wrote from memory. 'Read poetry,' he wrote: 'poetry makes men better.' How often, in my later life, I realized the truth of this remark of his! Read poetry: it makes men better. ~ Pyotr Kropotkin

Yet, beauty cannot be forgotten,
Eternal Wisdom can never die ... ~ E.A. Bucchianeri

I wish to stay drenched
forever
in those rain-blue eyes
in those...soul-reaching crystals

not moving a muscle
nor breathing
just
savoring
this turquoise ache
against my heart. ~ Sanober Khan

Sitting makes us think of standing
Our current stance keeps on demanding
We wish to fly without the wings
Puppets move before pulling the strings ~ Munia Khan

He knows all my thoughts.
He knows all I've ever done
and He loves me all the same.
What is our purpose, you ask.
It is to love like God. ~ Kamand Kojouri

Blackadder was fifty-four and had come to editing Ash out of pique. He was the son and grandson of Scottish schoolmasters. His grandfather recited poetry on firelight evenings: Marmion, Childe Harold, Ragnarok. His father sent him to Downing College in Cambridge to study under F. R. Leavis. Leavis did to Blackadder what he did to serious students; he showed him the terrible, the magnificent importance and urgency of English literature and simultaneously deprived him of any confidence in his own capacity to contribute to, or change it. The young Blackadder wrote poems, imagined Dr Leavis's comments on them, and burned them. ~ A.S. Byatt

It's true I've been hurt a few times after revealing myself. There are people who lie in wait for the vulnerable and pounce as a way to feel powerful. But God forgive them. I'm willing to take the occasional blow to find people I connect with. As long as you're willing to turn the other cheek with the mean ones, vulnerability can get you a wealth of friends. Can you imagine coming to the end of your life, being surrounded by people who loved you, only to realize they never fully knew you? Or having poems you never shared or injustices you said nothing about? Can you imagine realizing, then, it was too late? How can we be loved if we are always in hiding? ~ Donald Miller

They come into white people's lives like that in sudden sharp black trickles that isolate white facts for an instant in unarguable truth like under a microscope; the rest of the time just voices that laugh when you see nothing to laugh at, tears when no reason for tears. They will bet on the odd or even number of mourners at a funeral. A brothel full of them in Memphis went into a religious trance ran naked into the street. It took three policemen to subdue one of them. Yes Jesus O good man Jesus O that good man. The ~ William Faulkner

the happiness of every artist fits into my palm" says the homeless with no arms "when i had my hands i wrote beautiful pieces of poetry the poems were nesting under my nails i just had to snap with my fingers and rhymes were born" there ~ Zoltan Komor

I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences. ~ Walt Whitman

One of my latest sensations was going to Lady Airlie's to hear Browning read his own poems - with the comport of finding that, at least, if you don't understand them, he himself apparently understands them even less. He read them as if he hated them and would like to bite them to pieces. ~ Henry James

Beauty Killer"

If I can't be beautiful.. I'd rather just die.

So self-obsessed with my mascara and mistakes.
Vanity's like a funeral an everyone's at my wake.
Before I run out of air there's more makeup to apply.
Doll eyes stare into Valium colored skies...

I gotta sweet tooth and strawberry youth.
You wanna be my licorice and misguided truth.
And right now - I'll show you how.. I'm a beauty killer.

Rhinestone my eyes closed and please fix my hair.
This concealer can't hide all my pink nightmares.
Before I run out of air there's more makeup to apply.
Doll eyes stare into Valium colored skies.

I almost died but it felt great.
Faking perfection wasn't worth the wait.
I may be easy, easy to hate.
But you're so fucking easy.. easy to break.

I gotta sweet tooth and strawberry youth.
You wanna be my licorice and misguided truth.
And right now - I'll show you how.. I'm a beauty killer.

I almost died but it felt great.
Faking perfection wasn't worth the wait.
I may be easy, easy to hate.
But you're so fucking easy.. easy to break.

Tell me your secrets and ill tell you my lies.
Everything is monotone in my dead eyes.
If I cant be beautiful..I'd rather just die.
I'm a beauty killer.

I gotta sweet tooth and strawberry youth.
You wanna be my licorice and misguided truth.
And right now - ~ Jeffree Star

I never laugh or smile when I am writing. When I come home for lunch after writing all morning, my wife says I look like I just came home from a funeral. This is not bragging. This is an illness. ~ Carl Hiaasen

You never wear red to no funeral; red says the dead person was a fool. ~ Greg Iles

Inside each of us is a deep well of translucent water. A fluidity of thoughts and luminous feelings surrounds you and me. In the world of water, all life floats, the incandescent soul of the living begins, where you and I are indivisible, where I experience you inside of me. I see your beauty, feel your need for love and affection, hear your compassionate poems, and know the fragrant mysteries your great heart brews; by law divine, with sweet emotion, you and I shall mingle forevermore. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

When you were far
I felt that you're a life giving boon
But only in the moments
You came nearby
That I understood
You are the funeral pyre ~ Jyoti Patel

If formality and courtesy take over the feelings . . . how silly and meaningless these things could become. And despite all this, I still take part in it! ~ Fumio Obata