Poetry Quotes

You must remain. I must depart.Two autumns falling in the heart.

~ Buson

Because Dad told you he'd be here forever. Because I thought forever was like Mars -- far away.

~ Kwame Alexander

I’m passing the bar Where you first got in my car I’m not ashamed to admit That it’s you I won’t forget I saved your cigarettes andBad habits I regret But the hours flew by like cloudsWhenever I had you around Parachute loverTake me awayFrom the plane that went crashing And the earth that’s in flamesSaving you is saving me High above the redwood treesBut down below I see shadows And parachute debris We're drifting like children Along for the rideEach time we find love Another parachute arrivesOur madness will burn As bright as the sunAnd I’ll keep finding lovers But you were the one

~ Crystal Woods

I stood in your doorway this morningdreaming you’d turn aroundyou’d tilt your headyou’d softly whisper ”stay”or that you’d grab my armsto shake me while askingwhat the hell are we doingwe loveeach otherand this is not rightso we will make this worknow stay!You poured your coffee. Stirred the spoon like a crystal manwith your back to me and not a sound. the fridge humming elegies while the clock ticked onand the streets are so clean here people rushing to workand maybe I should be tooby nowat this agethis stagethis town.I will stand in that doorway dreamingfor many nights to come.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

My mom’s smile is genuine,A lilac beamingIn the presence of her Sun.Indentions in the sand proveTime’s linear progression,Her hair yet unblighted,Carrying midnight’s consistency.Clear tracks fading as theMovement slips furtherIn the past.CheekbonesHigh, soft,In summer’s hue,Hopeful.Each step’s unknown impact,A future looking back.My father’s strength:One whoseLife is in his arms.Squinting past the camera,He rests upon a rockLike caramel corn half eaten,Just to the leftOf man-made concrete conventionDaylight’s eraserRemoving color to his right.Dustin sitsIn my father’s lap,Open mouth of a droolingBig mouth bass;Muscle toneOf a well exercisedJelly fish,He looks at meHalf aware;His wheelchairPerched at the edgeOf parking lot gravel graftedLike a scar on nature’s beach,Opening to the ironic splendorOf a bitter tasting lake.I took the picture.Age 11.Capturing the pinnacle arcOf a sonTo my lilacWhoOutlived him and weeps,Still.Their sky has staple holes –Maybe that’s how theLightLeaked out.

~ Darcy Leech

What I want to know is how you go on when you look aroundand don’t see anywhere you want to go without the only personyou can’t have.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

Had I known, I would not have left you,alone beneath those stars,on the night when I last saw you,not knowing it was the last.

~ Lang Leav

If thou wilt leave me, do not leave me last,When other petty griefs have done their spite,But in the onset come: so shall I tasteAt first the very worst of fortune’s might;And other strains of woe, which now seem woe,Compar’d with loss of thee will not seem so.

~ William Shakespeare

Now and then, I remember you in timesUnbelievable. And in places not made for memoryBut for the transient, the passing that does not remain.

~ Yehuda Amichai

There are pieces of you that will always be with me.

~ Nicole Garcia

You kissed me that morning as if you’d never done it before and never would again and now I write another letter that I will never dare to send, collecting memories of loss like chains tight around my chest,and if you see a fire from the shore tonightit’s my chains going up in flames.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

The things you let go will someday teach you how to fly.

~ Jenim Dibie

There’s a lamentation in the flutter of your lash.

~ Laura A. Lord

Tomorrow camewith the illusion of todayeven more fleeting than yesterdayit camelike it always comesand wentlike it’s always gonelike a favorite song in its final secondsTomorrow came and leftleaving nothingnothing...but a familiarlingeringsense of loss behind.

~ Sanober Khan

most of the timesit’s the hardest to saywhat I love moreyouor your memory.

~ Sanober Khan

No one else was as close and as open, No one else so boiled my blood, Even he, who consigned me to torment, Even he, who caressed and forgot.

~ Anna Akhmatova

Even as I hold youI think of you as someone gonefar, far away. Your eyes the colorof pennies in a bowl of dark honeybringing sweet light to someone elseyour black hair slipping through my fingersis the flash of your head goingaround a corneryour smile, breaking before me,the flippant last turnof a revolving door,emptying you out, changed,away from me.Even as I hold youI am letting go.

~ Alice Walker

love canembellish its beginningsing its blossomingand engrave its eternitiesbut can never explain its loss.

~ Sanober Khan

That loss is common would not makeMy own less bitter, rather more:Too common! Never morning woreTo evening, but some heart did break.

~ Alfred Tennyson

i want the moon tattooed on my wristsmy grandmother keeps asking me to pray, i don’t have the heart to tell her that mypoems are the only God i have left in memy mother keeps leaving without saying goodbyei wish she’d let me cut my hair in the 7th grade,maybe i’d know how to deal with loss by nowi told myself i’d stop kissing boys who didn’t know my namei said, i’d stop picking at my bones like broken decorations,i’d quit with the smoking and the drunken poems, and when i said things like “my bones are heavy” i would only mean itas a good thingheavy bones can’t be broken,you can’t break heavy bones

~ Irynka

A few cold words on yonder stone, A corpse as cold as they can be -­ Vain words, and mouldering dust, alone -­ Can this be all that's left of thee? O, no! thy spirit lingers still Where'er thy sunny smile was seen: There's less of darkness, less of chill On earth, than if thou hadst not been.Thou breathest in my bosom yet, And dwellest in my beating heart; And, while I cannot quite forget, Thou, darling, canst not quite depart.

~ Anne Brontë

Severed and gone, so many years! And art thou still so dear to me, That throbbing heart and burning tears Can witness how I cling to thee?

~ Anne Brontë

My choices are rejections, since there is no other way,but what I reject is more numerous,denser, more demanding than before.A little poem, a sigh, at the cost of indescribable loss.

~ Wisława Szymborska

No mark survives this place: you too will yieldto unmemory.

~ Mathew Henderson

Look up, greet sparks of fire with salted eyes,For he’s a burning atmospheric sigh:One blaze of liquid flame on midnight sky,Soft orbital decay, and last goodbye.

~ Alan James Roll

And maybe one winter it will get too cold and I’ll forget about the summers we once shared. My family portrait mightfold in too, producing the same horrific effect as Jeremy’s: that I, all along, had another sibling who eclipsed and became me—a prosperous sibling, an imposturous sibling, who outgrew a sense of time and place in which the three of us were everything to one another. Then only my blood in the sea could unfold and lead me back out of the origami.

~ Nicholaus Patnaude

There is the staircase,there is the sun.There is the kitchen,the plate with toast and strawberry jam,your subterfuge,your ordinary mirage.You stand red-handed.You want to wash yourself in earth, in rocks and grassWhat are you supposed to dowith all this loss?In the daylight we knowwhat's gone is gone,but at night it's different.Nothing gets finished,not dying, not mourning;the dead repeat themselves, like clumsy drunkslurching sideways through the doorswe open to them in sleep;these slurred guests, never entirely welcome,even those we have loved the most,especially those we have loved the most,returning from where we shoved themaway too quickly:from under the ground, from under the water,they clutch at us, they clutch at us,we won't let go.

~ Margaret Atwood

Heart, we will forget him!You and I, to-night!You may forget the warmth he gave,I will forget the light.When you have done, pray tell me,That I my thoughts may dim;Haste! lest while you’re lagging,I may remember him!

~ Emily Dickinson

Mother (fragment)...You asked me if I would be sad when it happenedand I am sad. But the iris I moved from your housenow hold in the dusty dry fists of their rootsgreen knives and forks as if waiting for dinner,as if spring were a feast. I thank you for that.Were it not for the way you taught me to lookat the world, to see the life at play in everything, I would have to be lonely forever.

~ Ted Kooser

Try to be thoughtful, don't make the poor man say it;see how human he is,he has children of his own,it is your job t

~ Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno

And when I stand in the receiving linelike Jackie Kennedywithout the pillbox hat,if Jackie were fat and had taken enough Klonopinto still an ox,and you w

~ Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno

I am vulnerability under scarred skin. Numbness crawling behind wine soaked lips. A cocoon of grief battling a chest full of hushed breaths, longing to escape the mod-podge of memories, that journal where I've been. Layer after layer they are sealed upon my person, encapsulating time in a vessel that has sailed one too many shores.

~ Alfa H

She wasn’t broken.She was made up of a thousand tiny little cracks.She was always trying to keep herself glued together.But it was hard, she felt too much.No matter what she did, her emotions seeped through,sometimes in drips, other times in floods,She felt everything,the heaviness of the clouds right before rain,the rush of the subway cars as they left the station,the feeling of goodbye as she watched someone walk away,wondering if it was the last time she would see them,the feeling of a kiss lingering on her cheek for hours.She felt the loneliness of the sun as it hung in the sky,shedding light on the day,without companion.And she longed to give as much as the sun.If she could brighten someone’s day,bestow warmth were there was cold,make someone smile, give someone hope,then for a minute, an hour, maybe even a day,the cracks would fill with loveand the pain would become only a voice,reminding her that her pain was important.She knew how fragile life was, how hard,and how precious.She wanted to feel it all.

~ Jacqueline Simon Gunn

Raindrops fall from clouds of gray.The fragile flowers grow.Teardrops seem all I can say.They speak of endless woe.Your fingers wipe my grief away.A seed of love you sow.A hardened heart reverts to clay.You mold my love just so.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Remember me when I am gone away, Gone far away into the silent land; When you can no more hold me by the hand,Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.Remember me when no more day by day You tell me of our future that you planned: Only remember me; you understandIt will be late to counsel then or pray.Yet if you should forget me for a while And afterwards remember, do not grieve: For if the darkness and corruption leaveA vestige of the thoughts that once I had,Better by far you should forget and smile Than that you should remember and be sad.

~ Christina Rossetti

The Triumph Of AchillesIn the story of Patroclusno one survives, not even Achilleswho was nearly a god.Patroclus resembled him; they worethe same armor.Always in these friendshipsone serves the other, one is less than the other:the hierarchyis always apparent, though the legendscannot be trusted--their source is the survivor,the one who has been abandoned.What were the Greek ships on firecompared to this loss?In his tent, Achillesgrieved with his whole beingand the gods sawhe was a man already dead, a victimof the part that loved,the part that was mortal.

~ Louise Glück

absencelooks like a lake bed flooded with skysounds like cotton howlingtastes like tear-stained pillowssmells like churning bile and burnt hairfeels like screaming agony, my heart dying and dying

~ Beth Morey

I used to be a poet.My words were traded in marketplaces like pieces of gold.Merchants bought my verses for as much as they paid for saffron and Indian jade.Now I am old...drunk on wine and candle fumes.Alone in this barren room, I speak my psalms to the night air so as to entertain moths before they go off to die.I used to be a poet and my words were gold.

~ Roman Payne

At Night on the High SeasAt night, when the sea cradles meAnd the pale star gleamLies down on its broad waves,Then I free myself whollyFrom all activity and all the loveAnd stand silent and breathe purely,Alone, alone cradled by the seaThat lies there, cold and silent, with a thousand lights.Then I have to think of my friendsAnd my gaze sinks into their eyes,And I ask each one, silent and alone:Are you still mine?Is my sorrow a sorrow to you, my death a death?Do you feel from my love, my grief,Just a breath, just an echo?And the sea peacefully gazes back, silent,And smiles: NOAnd no greetings and no answers come from anywhere.

~ Hermann Hesse

Consider in his spiritual martyr this being who lies with closed eyes, dislocated like the victim of a brutal accident who no longer requires care or rescue. Count the stabbing wounds of the hideous disappointment in the human imagination. Auscultate this pensive desert where alternate the rale and the silence. Feel pity for the grief that calls not only for death, but for a disgracied death, and receive, o World, this weight of trampled dream in the paradise with no conscience of your vain eternity !

~ Anna De Noailles