The other side of this.

Poems on mortality & death

 

Me first:

I am afraid of mortality.
It keeps me wakeful through many night. It rests heavy on my mind & never perches on eyelids.
I truly wish I was braver or less honest in this,
This Honesty ebbs in me but feels weak,
It feels like an inevitablity that isn’t worth the time in this life, but there it dances on my mind’s eye,
I watch it flicker in the night.

A downhill slope- watching everything around wilt & die. What meant something, that which mattered; temporary & fleeting.
Hard to hold head on high & not falter from time to time. Tis noble, tho, to be clear of fiction, men of rigor & science.

A warning that true love is quite a double edged sword; it makes me swoon in daily life & trying times, but it’s so pure.

“Oh how wondrous it is to finally find you, my cherished love! So it is *now* I can begin to watch you waste & wither.”

 

True love is a tragedy in the end. It is patient & worthy & rare, but truly the most profound of all tragedies.

–MH

(real poets like Dylan Thomas, Keats, Cummings, after clicking here: )

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

– Dylan Thomas

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“Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not soe,
For, those, whom thou think’st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill mee.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell’st thou then?
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.”

— John Donne

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“This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—
I hold it towards you.”

– John Keats

————————————————–

“The Moving Finger writes; and having writ,
Moves on: nor all they Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”

– Verse 51, Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

—————————–

dying is fine)but Death

?o
baby
i

wouldn’t like

Death if Death
were
good:for

when(instead of stopping to think)you

begin to feel of it,dying
‘s miraculous
why?be

cause dying is

perfectly natural;perfectly
putting
it mildly lively(but

Death

is strictly
scientific
& artificial &

evil & legal)

we thank thee
god
almighty for dying
(forgive us,o life!the sin of Death

— EE Cummnings