"My Friends Don't Get Buried" Wonderful Poem by Edward Hirsch

The New Yorker

Poems

June 25, 2018 Issue

My Friends Don’t Get Buried

By Edward Hirsch

Audio: Read by the author.

My friends don’t get buried
in cemeteries anymore, their wives
can’t stand the sadness
of funerals, the spectacle
of wreaths and prayers, tear-soaked
speeches delivered from the altar,
all those lies and encomiums,
the suffocating smell of flowers
filling everything.
No more undertakers in black suits
clutching handkerchiefs,
old buddies weeping in corners,
telling off-color stories, nipping shots,
no more covered mirrors,
black dresses, skullcaps and crucifixes.
Sometimes it takes me a year or two
to get out to the back yard in Sheffield
or Fresno, those tall ashes scattered
under a tree somewhere in a park
somewhere in New Jersey.
I am a delinquent mourner
stepping on pinecones, forgetting to pray.
But the mourning goes on anyway
because my friends keep dying
without a schedule,
without even a funeral,
while the silence
drums us from the other side,
the suffocating smell of flowers
fills everything, always,
the darkness grows warmer, then colder,
I just have to lie down on the grass
and press my mouth to the earth
to call them
so they would answer.

• Edward Hirsch is the author of, most recently, the book “Gabriel: A Poem.”

Non Sequitur Comic: Gravestone of sibling who died 1st reads "I WIN" !!

Non Sequitur Comic Strip, September 14, 2015 on GoComics.com

"Visiting My Gravesite: Talbott Churchyard, West Virginia", Poem by Irene McKinney

Poem of the Day: Visiting My Gravesite: Talbott Churchyard, West Virginia BY IRENE MCKINNEY Maybe because I was married and felt secure and dead at once, I listened to my father's urgings about "the future" and bought this double plot on the hillside with a view of the bare white church, the old elms, and the creek below. I plan now to use both plots, luxuriantly spreading out in the middle of a big double bed. —But no, finally, my burial has nothing to do with marriage, this lying here in these same bones will be as real as anything I can imagine for who I'll be then, as real as anything undergone, going back and forth to "the world" out there, and here to this one spot on earth I really know. Once I came in fast and low in a little plane and when I looked down at the church, the trees I've felt with my hands, the neighbors' houses and the family farm, and I saw how tiny what I loved or knew was, it was like my children going on with their plans and griefs at a distance and nothing I could do about it. But I wanted to reach down and pat it, while letting it know I wouldn't interfere for the world, the world being everything this isn't, this unknown buried in the known. Irene McKinney, "Visiting My Gravesite: Talbott Churchyard, West Virginia" from Unthinkable: Selected Poems 1976-2004. Copyright © 2009 by Irene McKinney. Reprinted by permission of Red Hen Press. Source: Unthinkable: Selected Poems 1976-2004 (Red Hen Press, 2009)

Dirge Without Music, Poem, Burial & Darkness Of Grave

Dirge Without Music by Edna St. Vincent Millay I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground. So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind: Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned. Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you. Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust. A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew, A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost. The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,— They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve. More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world. Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind; Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave. I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned. "Dirge Without Music" by Edna St. Vincent Millay, from Collected Poems. © Harper Perennial, 2011.