Time Does Not Bring Relief
Time does not bring relief you all have lied Who told me time would ease me of my pain! I miss him in the weeping of the rain I want him at the shrinking of the tide The old snows melt from every mountain-side, And last years leaves are smoke in every lane But last years bitter loving must remain Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide. There are a hundred places where I fear To go,so with his memory they brim. And entering with relief some quiet place Where never fell his foot or shone his face I say, There is no memory of him here! And so stand stricken, so remembering him.
So Well Go No More A Roving Lord Byron
So, well go no more a rovingSo late into the night,Though the heart be still as loving,And the moon be still as bright.For the sword outwears its sheath,And the soul wears out the breast,And the heart must pause to breathe,And love itself have rest.Though the night was made for loving,And the day returns too soon,Yet well go no more a rovingBy the light of the moon.
Suicide Poems To Help With Grief And Healing
Jennifer is a prolific writer with over 10 years of experience in online writing. She enjoys creating quotes and poems.
When you lose someone to suicide, trying to find solace in a world that has lost its color is hard. One thing that some people find comforting when they are grieving this kind of loss is poetry. Poetry can express the right words to make you feel less alone. Explore original poems that you can share with your family and loved ones to start healing together.
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Poems For Bereavement Beautiful Poems About Grief And Loss
At times during your bereavement, you may find yourself drawn to the written arts or music for solace. Theres something very comforting about the wisdom shared through the ages via poetry or thoughtful quotes about grief and loss. And music touches the soul in a way nothing else can.
Our hope is that you find comfort for yourself by exploring our great collection of poems for bereavement in this section:
Grief poetry can make a very thoughtful gift for a friend who lost a loved one.
Poems About Grief And Healing
While poetry gives the space to celebrate feelings of joy or being in love, it also helps process pain. For this reason, poetry is often used as a great coping mechanism.
Many poems feature themes touching on universal experiences like life, death, and loss. One such theme is grief a wretched pain that everyone experiences eventually. Grief can strike after loss, and loss comes in many forms: loss of a loved one, a beloved pet, a golden opportunity, a keepsake, or a thousand other things. Still we grieve.
Most commonly, grief poems are elegies. In other words, they reflect and lament someones death. Other poems about grief and healing will use images of death and loss or will express intense vulnerability to show the magnitude of their pain.
6 Poems About Grief and Healing
These six poets grieve across topic and time. They also show the various ways structure can be used in a poem of grief, reconciliation, and healing.
1. The Night Where You No Longer Live by Meghan O’Rourke
Megan ORourke wrote this poem full of questions after losing her mother. Though the poem is a body of questions, there are no question marks, indicating the writer has no expectation of receiving an answer. Instead, these questions are asked in limbo, asked into a void. ORourke faces the grief of losing her mother by wondering. By wondering, she inches toward healing, but she is stuck on The Night Where You No Longer Live. The last line reads, Will you stay the night.
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Grief Is Lonely And Isolating
As we walk through loss, it can feel like we are making a solo journey through the desert with our feet sinking heavily into the sand as the sun burns hot on our shoulders, and every dry breath slowly suffocates us.
Poetry has the ability to capture the heaviest emotions as they occur in the moment. Reading about others experiences with grief and loss connects us with universal suffering, helping to ease feelings of loneliness and isolation.
Dont leave me, even for an hour, becausethen the little drops of anguish will all run together,the smoke that roams looking for a home will driftinto me, choking my lost heart. Pablo Neruda, 1904-1973
Poems encapsulate human vulnerability they are courage in written form. A poems ability to explain an emotion can help us get in touch with our own deepest, most painful feelings. An awareness of our pain can be therapeutic since it requires us to process through our suffering rather than try to escape it. When we view pain as a measure of love, it can change our perspective on loss. A wise friend of mine explained the intensity of our pain is a direct reflection of the love we felt for the person we lost. Thus, poems of loss are really love letters.
Grief By Ashraful Musaddeq
This work makes a somber end to our list of poems of grief. Unlike many of the other poets we’ve mentioned, Musaddeq paints death and grief as dark, black and numbing. âGrief cuts the heart with a silent scissor,â he writes, suggesting that grief is sharp, cutting, and makes us bleed in sorrow. He questions whether grief ever ends or is as permanent as death for âone and all, for living and non-livings.â
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The Power Of Words To Heal
Many healing modalities especially art therapy recommend poetry for grief and healing. One of the reasons poetry is so nourishing to human emotions is precisely because it is emotional in nature. It relates to our need to heal from the depths of our being and mirrors a sense of being seen by another. Poetry can also share transformative moments or revelations. It can inspire us and call us to look into the depths of issues that have been weighing heavily on our shoulders.
Most of all, it can relate to us so profoundly, that it can feel as though we are exchanging moments of vulnerability with another. This recognition of the universality of our plight gives us hope that yes, we are not suffering in vain and that yes, like all the other brave souls before us, we will live to tell our stories as a badge of honor to inspire others who will be nourished by our own words.
Reading and writing poetry is speaking the language of the soul in almost a meditative tone that listens closely to whats hidden within. It is a profound experience of acknowledging someone elses or ones own humanity, making the experience of interacting with poetry truly healing and transformative!
In his published paper, Finding the Words to Say It: The Healing Power of Poetry, Robert Carroll describes the healing power of words as such:
For Those Who Have Died
Judah HaLevi
To love, to hope, to dream,And oh, to lose.A thing for fools, this,Love,To love what death can touch.
For your life has lived in meYou laugh once lifted me Your word was a gift to me.
To remember this brings painful joy.
Tis a human thing, love,A holy thing,
Before you know what kindness really isyou must lose things,feel the future dissolve in a momentlike salt in a weakened broth.What you held in your hand,what you counted and carefully saved,all this must go so you knowhow desolate the landscape can bebetween the regions of kindness.How you ride and ridethinking the bus will never stop,the passengers eating maize and chickenwill stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindnessyou must travel where the Indian in a white poncholies dead by the side of the road.You must see how this could be you,how he too was someonewho journeyed through the night with plansand the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.You must wake up with sorrow.You must speak to it till your voicecatches the thread of all sorrowsand you see the size of the cloth.Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,only kindness that ties your shoesand sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,only kindness that raises its headfrom the crowd of the world to sayIt is I you have been looking for,and then goes with you everywherelike a shadow or a friend.
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Stages Of Grief By Bridgid Patrick
Bridgid Patrick suggests in this poem three stages of grieving. The first is The Torment, which is the initial stage of shock and horror of losing a loved one. This is described as feeling like drowning in icy water, and being âswallowed by sorrowâ. This is followed by The Healing, where the water ebbs away to allow the griever to begin the process of healing. The final stage is The Future, where hope glimmers as the pain of the loss begins to dim in the light of a âbrand new dayâ.
‘the Bustle In A House’
Emily Dickinson, American poet, 1830-1886
“The Bustle in a HouseThe Morning after Death
The Sweeping up the HeartAnd putting Love awayWe shall not want to use againUntil Eternity “
Henry Van Dyke, American author, 1852-1933
“I am standing upon the seashore. A ship, at my side,spreads her white sails to the moving breeze and startsfor the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength.I stand and watch her until, at length, she hangs like a speckof white cloud just where the sea and sky come to mingle with each other.
Then, someone at my side says, “There, she is gone.”
Gone where?
Gone from my sight. That is all. She is just as large in mast,hull and spar as she was when she left my side.And, she is just as able to bear her load of living freight to her destined port.Her diminished size is in me not in her.
And, just at the moment when someone says, “There, she is gone,”there are other eyes watching her coming, and other voicesready to take up the glad shout, “Here she comes!”
And that is dying…”
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Grief Is A Conversation Of Hearts
I have not heard your voice in years,
but my heart has conversations
with you every day.
Get this handwritten poetry print to keep on your walls or nightstand, or give it as a gift when you don’t know what else to give.
There is no grief like the grief that does not speak. Henry Wordsworth
. . .
Which of these poems did you need to read today?
Tell me in the comments. I read every single one, and I’d love to know.
With love,
Do Not Stand At My Grave And Weep
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 sunlight on ripened grain. I am the gentle autumn rain. When you awaken in the mornings hush I am the swift uplifting rush Of quiet birds in circled flight. I am the soft stars that shine at night. Do not stand at my grave and cry I am not there. I did not die.
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Four Feet Rudyard Kipling
I have done mostly what most men do,And pushed it out of my mind But I cant forget, if I wanted to,Four-Feet trotting behind.Day after day, the whole day throughWherever my road inclinedFour-feet said, I am coming with you!And trotted along behind.Now I must go by some other round,Which I shall never findSomewhere that does not carry the soundOf Four-Feet trotting behind.
Grief Poems About Regret And Depression
Short Poems About Grief: The Same Love But Different
Grief has taught me that loving is pretty similar to living: maybe, two lines in the same poem. Read these poems about grief to remember that death is part of the circle of life. That without an end, something couldnt begin. And maybe circles dont really have endings or beginnings, just continuations.
If you want to decorate your home with poetry, or gift it to someone you care about, go here to see what I’ve been making.
Where there is love, there is life. Mahatma Gandhi
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On The Death Of The Beloved
Though we need to weep your loss, You dwell in that safe place in our hearts, Where no storm or night or pain can reach you.
Your love was like the dawn Brightening over our lives A further adventure of colour.
The sound of your voice Found for us
Whatever you enfolded in your gaze Quickened in the joy of its being You placed smiles like flowers On the altar of the heart. Your mind always sparkled
Though your days here were brief, Your spirit was live, awake, complete.
We look towards each other no longer From the old distance of our names Now you dwell inside the rhythm of breath, As close to us as we are to ourselves.
Though we cannot see you with outward eyes, We know our souls gaze is upon your face, Smiling back at us from within everything To which we bring our best refinement.
Let us not look for you only in memory, Where we would grow lonely without you. You would want us to find you in presence, Beside us when beauty brightens, When kindness glows And music echoes eternal tones.
When orchids brighten the earth, Darkest winter has turned to spring May this dark grief flower with hope In every heart that loves you.
May you continue to inspire us:
To enter each day with a generous heart. To serve the call of courage and love Until we see your beautiful face again In that land where there is no more separation, Where all tears will be wiped from our mind, And where we will never lose you again.
On The Death Of The Beloved By John Odonohue
Though we need to weep your loss,
You dwell in that safe place in our hearts,
Where no storm or night or pain can reach you
Let us not look for you only in memory,
Where we would grow lonely without you.
You would want us to find you in presence,
Beside us when beauty brightens,
When kindness glows
And music echoes eternal tones.
Philosopher and poet John ODonohue has a gift with his words that can best be described through this quote by Martin Wroe: believed that it is within our power to transform our fear of death so that we need fear little else this life brings. Just like the poem above, the pain we feel is truly powerful in the sense that it can move mountains and change the world. Its important not to forget that.
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‘do Not Stand At My Grave And Weep’
, American florist, 1905-200
“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 sunlight on ripened grain.I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning’s hushI am the swift uplifting rushOf quiet birds in circled flight.I am the soft stars that shine at night.Do not stand at my grave and cry I am not there I did not die.”
Happy The Man John Dryden
Happy the man, and happy he alone,He who can call today his own:He who, secure within, can say,Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.Be fair or foul or rain or shineThe joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.Not Heaven itself upon the past has power,But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.
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Her Journeys Just Begun Ellen Brenneman
Dont think of her as gone away her journeys just begun,life holds so many facets this earth is only one.Just think of her as restingfrom the sorrows and the tearsin a place of warmth and comfortwhere there are no days and years.Think how she must be wishingthat we could know todayhow nothing but our sadnesscan really pass away.And think of her as livingAnd think of her as livingIn the hearts of those she touchedFor nothing loved is ever lost And she was loved so much.
Poetry Helps Us Connect
Even though we might not be able to express the need to have people support us at times of loss, it is truly needed. I see you, and being there when I need you means the world to me. I just wanted to let you know.
This is for everyone who has been there for me during the most difficult times of my life.
I See You: Being There Is Important by Jill Carbone
I see you when your eyes dont meet my gazeYou walk around in a haze of grief, and I cant relieve your painYou wear it like an oversized sweater on a chilly, autumn dayIt keeps you swathed in sadness while the demons in your head playI see youI sense your silent sufferingSpeaking muted the volume turned low a buffer This wall between me and you is thick and impenetrableYet I know the reasons for your grief are venerableI see youYou dont answer my calls or texts or knocks at the doorAm I annoying you as I implore you to stop this one man warI imagine you alone in a tango with your thoughts Tears teasing, your stomach twisted in knotsI see youIf you let me in, I wont judge your sorrowI wont tell you it will be better tomorrowThe truth is I dont know the answerThere is no rain dance to cure deaths natural disasterI see youI promise you Ill listen as you find the wordsAnd if they fly away quietly, I will not be your mockingbirdWell sit beneath the wise oak and share a cup of tea Ill ask nothing of you well just beI see you
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