Between grief and nothing, I will take grief
Musee des Beaux Arts / W H Auden
After great pain, a formal feeling comes
My life closed twice before its close
Much hurrying / Brenda Hillman
Not waving but drowning / Stevie Smith
Do not go gentle into that good night / Dylan Thomas
Pyrrhic victory / Lucie Brock-Broido
Ever / Brenda Shaughnessy
Do not pick up the telephone / Ted Hughes
Funeral blues / W H Auden
Graveyard blues / Natasha Trethewey
For a woman dead at thirty / Jean Valentine
Final Notations / Adrienne Rich
One continuous substance / Albert Goldbarth
Bereavement / Kevin Young
This hour and what is dead / Li-Young Lee
Carrion comfort / Gerard Manley Hopkins
From choir practice / Forrest Hamer
Sea canes / Derek Walcott
Autumn passage / Elizabeth Alexander
Let evening come / Jane Kenyon
I believe, but what is belief?
Nothing gold can stay / Robert Frost
Dreaming of the dead / Anne Stevenson
Elegy for Jane / Theodore Roethke
On the death of friends in childhood / Donald Justice
We assume: on the death of our son, Reuben Masai Harper / Michael S Harper
Written on the due date of a son never born / David Wojahn
Stillbirth / Laure-Anne Bosselaar
Mid-term break / Seamus Heaney
How some of it happened / Marie Howe
Freedom, New Hampshire / Galway Kinnell
Oh antic God / Lucille Clifton
Speaking to my dead mother / Ruth Stone
My sister, who died young, takes up the task / Jon Pineda
Elegy for my father / Mark Strand
Men at my father's funeral / William Matthews
On the death of a colleague / Stephen Dunn
Marquee moon / Jeff Fallis
Facts of grief / Jim Daniels
David Lemieux / Denise Duhamel
Dirge without music / Edna St Vincent Millay.
What did I know, what did I know
After / Elizabeth Alexander
Poems for my brother Kenneth / Owen Dodson
Artifact / Claudia Emerson
Remember me / Hal Sirowitz
Death is a woman / Joy Harjo
Memorial: son Bret / William Stafford
Morning baking / Carolyn Forche
Hand me down blues / Calvin Forbes
Bones of my father / Etheridge Knight
Those winter Sundays / Robert Hayden
Asked for a happy memory of her father, she recalls Wrigley Field / Beth Ann Fennelly
Forgiving my father / Lucille Clifton
Cosmos, late blooming / D A Powell
Abiku / Afaa Michael Weaver
Refusal to mourn the death, by fire, of a child in London / Dylan Thomas
Luke and the duct tape / Coleman Barks
Birthday poem / Erin Murphy
You don't miss your water / Cornelius Eady
Tomorrow, the bowl I have yet to fill
My religion / Anne Carson
Truth the dead know / Anne Sexton
Listen Lord: a prayer / James Weldon Johnson
Dedication for a plot of ground / William Carlos Williams
Facing it / Yusef Komunyakaa
Funeral rites / Seamus Heaney
Not forgotten / Toi Derricotte
After your death / Natasha Trethewey
Seersucker suit / Deborah Digges
Until she returns / Reginald Shepherd
Oboe in Handel's largo from Xerxes as elegy / Quan Barry
My father's body / William Matthews
My mother's body, my professor, my bower / Jean Valentine
Dead letters / Mary Jo Salter
I needed to talk to my sister / Grace Paley
Fatal April / Thomas Sayers Ellis
Celestial music / Louise Gluck
Trying to pray / James Wright
Ice storm / Robert Hayden
Wasteful gesture only not / Tony Hoagland
Blues procession / Terrance Hayes
I just wanna testify / Cornelius Eady
Incensation at the funeral / Matthew Rohrer
My father's funeral / Karl Shapiro
Cold calls / Edward Hirsch
Burial [no woman no cry] / Kevin Young
Translation / Franz Wright
Storm valediction / Campbell McGrath
One art / Elizabeth Bishop
I learn by going where I have to go
Gilded shadow / Jane Mayhall
On new terms / Deborah Garrison
For the anniversary of my death / W S Merwin
Try to praise the mutilated world translated by Clare Cavanagh / Adam Zagajewski
My father, in heaven, is reading out loud / Li-Young Lee
Practice / Ellen Bryant Voigt
Re: happiness, in pursuit thereof / C D Wright
Light turnouts / John Ashbery
Living alone (II) / Denise Levertov
Death poem / Kim Addonizio
Infirm / Gwendolyn Brooks
It is what it is / Paul Muldoon
Weeds and peonies / Donald Hall
After my death / David Young
Lucky life / Gerald Stern
Waking / Theodore Roethke.
What will survive of us in love
In the city of light / Larry Levis
Death shall have no Dominion / Dylan Thomas
What are years? / Marianne Moore
First Psalm / Anne Sexton
Grasses translated by Coleman Barks / Rumi
Redemption song / Kevin Young
From the Clay Hill anthology / Hayden Carruth
When death comes / Mary Oliver
I thank you God for most this amazing / E E Cummings
Unsolicited survey / Phillis Levin
Yet the books translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Hass / Czeslaw Milosz
Last words / James Merrill
Music is in the piano only when it is played / Jack Gilbert
Notes from the other side / Jane Kenyon
Self-portrait / Charles Wright
Did this ever happen to you / Franz Wright
Arundel tomb / Philip Larkin
Poem for a survivor / Donald Justice
Letter from God / Ruth L Schwartz
