No Epitaph

N
No moss nor mottle stains

My parents’ unmarked grave;

My word on them remains

Stouter than stone, you told me.


“Martyred to words”, you have thought,

Should be your epitaph;

At other times you fought

My self-reproaches down.


Though bitterly once or twice

You have reproached me with how

Everything ended in words,

We both know better now:


You understand, I shall not

If I survive you care

To raise a headstone for

You I have carved on air.


Rating:

Comment form:

*Max text - 1500. Manual moderation.

Similar Poems:

To the One Who is Reading Me by Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges
You are invulnerable. Didn’t they deliver
(those forces that control your destiny)
the certainty of dust? Couldn’t it be
your irreversible time is that river
in whose bright mirror Heraclitus read
his brevity? A marble slab is saved
for you, one you won’t read, already graved
with city, epitaph, dates of the dead.
Read Poem
0
155
Rating:

Astrophil and Stella 90: Stella, think not that I by verse seek fame by Sir Philip Sidney
Sir Philip Sidney
Stella, think not that I by verse seek fame,
Who seek, who hope, who love, who live but thee;
Thine eyes my pride, thy lips my history;
If thou praise not, all other praise is shame.
Nor so ambitious am I, as to frame
A nest for my young praise in laurel tree:
In truth I sweare, I wish not there should be
Graved in mine epitaph a Poet’s name:
Nay if I would, could I just title make,
That any laud to me thereof should grow,
Without my plumes from others’ wings I take.
For nothing from my wit or will doth flow,
Since all my words thy beauty doth endite,
And love doth hold my hand, and makes me write.
Read Poem
0
131
Rating:

This Scribe, My Hand by Ben Belitt
Ben Belitt
When this warm scribe, my hand, is in the grave.
—John Keats 1.

You are here
Read Poem
0
113
Rating:

An Elegy upon the Death of the Dean of Paul's, Dr. John Donne by Thomas Carew
Thomas Carew
Can we not force from widow'd poetry,
Now thou art dead (great Donne) one elegy
To crown thy hearse? Why yet dare we not trust,
Though with unkneaded dough-bak'd prose, thy dust,
Such as th' unscissor'd churchman from the flower
Of fading rhetoric, short-liv'd as his hour,
Dry as the sand that measures it, should lay
Upon thy ashes, on the funeral day?
Have we no voice, no tune? Didst thou dispense
Through all our language, both the words and sense?
'Tis a sad truth. The pulpit may her plain
And sober Christian precepts still retain,
Doctrines it may, and wholesome uses, frame,
Grave homilies and lectures, but the flame
Of thy brave soul (that shot such heat and light
Read Poem
0
109
Rating:

Autobiography by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
I am leading a quiet life
in Mike’s Place every day
watching the champs
of the Dante Billiard Parlor
and the French pinball addicts.
I am leading a quiet life
on lower East Broadway.
I am an American.
Read Poem
0
130
Rating:

The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church by Robert Browning
Robert Browning
Rome, 15— Vanity, saith the preacher, vanity!
Draw round my bed: is Anselm keeping back?
Nephews—sons mine . . . ah God, I know not! Well—
She, men would have to be your mother once,
Read Poem
0
160
Rating:

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray
Thomas Gray
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

Now fades the glimm'ring landscape on the sight,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds;

Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tow'r
The moping owl does to the moon complain
Of such, as wand'ring near her secret bow'r,
Molest her ancient solitary reign.

Read Poem
0
118
Rating:

A High-Toned Old Christian Woman by Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens
Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
We agree in principle. That's clear. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,
Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,
Is equally converted into palms,
Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,
Madame, we are where we began. Allow,
Therefore, that in the planetary scene
Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,
Read Poem
0
107
Rating:

In Honour of that High and Mighty Princess, Queen Elizabeth by Anne Bradstreet
Anne Bradstreet
Proem.
Although great Queen, thou now in silence lie,
Yet thy loud Herald Fame, doth to the sky
Thy wondrous worth proclaim, in every clime,
And so has vow’d, whilst there is world or time.
So great’s thy glory, and thine excellence,
The sound thereof raps every human sense
That men account it no impiety
To say thou wert a fleshly Deity.
Thousands bring off’rings (though out of date)
Thy world of honours to accumulate.
‘Mongst hundred Hecatombs of roaring Verse,
‘Mine bleating stands before thy royal Hearse.
Thou never didst, nor canst thou now disdain,
T’ accept the tribute of a loyal Brain.
Read Poem
0
130
Rating:

A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day by John Donne
John Donne
'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's,
Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;
The world's whole sap is sunk;
The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed's feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interr'd; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compar'd with me, who am their epitaph.

Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring;
For I am every dead thing,
In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
Read Poem
0
125
Rating:

A Poet! He Hath Put his Heart to School by William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth

A poet!—He hath put his heart to school,
Nor dares to move unpropped upon the staff
Which art hath lodged within his hand—must laugh
By precept only, and shed tears by rule.
Thy Art be Nature; the live current quaff,
And let the groveller sip his stagnant pool,
In fear that else, when Critics grave and cool
Have killed him, Scorn should write his epitaph.
How does the Meadow-flower its bloom unfold?
Because the lovely little flower is free
Down to its root, and, in that freedom, bold;
And so the grandeur of the Forest-tree
Comes not by casting in a formal mould,
But from its own divine vitality.
Read Poem
0
127
Rating:

Ring Out Your Bells by Sir Philip Sidney
Sir Philip Sidney
Ring out your bells, let mourning shows be spread;
For Love is dead—
All love is dead, infected
With plague of deep disdain;
Worth, as nought worth, rejected,
And Faith fair scorn doth gain.
From so ungrateful fancy,
From such a female franzy,
Read Poem
0
127
Rating:

University by Karl Shapiro
Karl Shapiro
To hurt the Negro and avoid the Jew
Is the curriculum. In mid-September
The entering boys, identified by hats,
Wander in a maze of mannered brick
Where boxwood and magnolia brood
And columns with imperious stance
Like rows of ante-bellum girls
Eye them, outlanders.
Read Poem
0
133
Rating:

What the Sexton Said by Vachel Lindsay
Vachel Lindsay
Your dust will be upon the wind
Within some certain years,
Though you be sealed in lead to-day
Amid the country’s tears.

When this idyllic churchyard
Becomes the heart of town,
The place to build garage or inn,
They’ll throw your tombstone down.

Your name so dim, so long outworn,
Your bones so near to earth,
Your sturdy kindred dead and gone,
How should men know your worth?

Read Poem
0
107
Rating: