sad poems

Death kissed my lips and took my hand,
Guiding me through a world so strange,
Where we never parted, never knew the pain,
Where love was never lost, never estranged.

What joy we’d have known, what life we’d have lived,
If only you had not gone away.
I would have held you close, forever near,
In a world untouched by cold decay.

But death’s embrace is all I was granted,
A walk with him, through memories undaunted,
Where you and I remain unbroken,
In the shadows of what might have been.

I dreamt of him beneath the silver moon,
his porcelain face cracked deep with golden light.
He looked at me with sorrow-laden eyes,
and I, entranced, returned his mournful gaze.

Between us stretched a silence, vast and cold,
yet in the hush, I knew he called to me.
He raised a fragile hand, so pale, so still.
I reached to meet him, fingertips outstretched.

She said it was a trial,
That I’d hear but wouldn’t know—
In this world I’m not a master,
So it’s silly for me to crow.
My ego brought on disaster:
She loathed me, I never knew;
So now I lie only with my dear—Denial.
 
 
The end rhyme scheme follows Frances Darwin Cornford’s poem, “The True Evil.”
 
 

Many years ago, this day,
As lingering clouds
Brought out the morning rays,
I heard the east wind drown
In the sound of the ocean spray.
 
She came in nightly
On a foaming swell,
Lady floating lightly
On a seaborne shell.
 
“Oh bury me not
In the deep blue sea;
Oh bury me not
Where the cold wind flees.”
 
I carried her home
For miles and miles . . .
If only I’d known
It was just for a while.
 
The words unsaid, undone—
Gone before our time had run.
 

eternal track to heaven
beneath the shadows—
eyes turned up to the sky
like a prison of light
 
showers fallen to the sea
as if dreaming of dust
and weeping until it rolls
to the shores of regret