NaPM 15 April 2022

[RiverNotch]

Rules: Write a poem for national poetry month on the topic or form described. Each poem should appear as a separate reply to this thread. The goal is to, at the end of the month, have written 30 poems for National Poetry Month.

Topic: Describe a person's death, their remains, or both.

Form: Sonnet (meter and rhyme aren't strict, but a volta is required -- in this case I follow Rimbaud's "Le Dormeur du Val")

Line Requirement: 12-14

[TranquillityBase]

It’s the third spring, and a dry one,
since Death made its auspicious entrance,
another April in an endless row
that stretch into my absent future,
black dominoes ready to fall
once Memory tips them over.
John’s ashes sit in a black box
atop a bookshelf, next to a harmonium
that I never heard him play.
I’m waiting for a signal out of love
to free him once and for all, but for now
I hold on to his captured remains,
twenty seven years old he was,
too young not to be remembered.

[CRNDLSM]

I'm not saying that we should
I would never eat human
Hypothetically we could
None of us really knew him.
And he is already dead
And he's going to spoil soon
Well die too if we're not fed
This place will be all of our tombs!

None of us want to do this.
Should we take a vote on it?
So his body can save us?
Okay so no one's against...
I guess we'll start with his thighs,
Oh my God he's still alive!

[Mark A Becker]

Hi Tim,
Soul wrenching writing my friend.
Thanks for posting this.
Mark

[busker]

that stretch into my absent future,
black dominoes ready to fall
once Memory tips them over.

This is poignant and sublime

[Semicircle]

He died standing up
the affects of rigor mortis
triggered instantaneously,
in the history museum,
amongst the wax figures
he was organizing.
Trapped forever in a stasis
of pure agony.

But, this is how he wanted to die,
and this is exactly how he
wished to be immortalized,
so he could pass
as a fake person
and make children cry.

[dukealien]

Last Life in Death


What must it be to die unpeacefully,
not recognizing nurse or child or bed–
for mind to live when memory has fled,
to see and move and think  meaninglessly
trapped in a body, whole though nearly dead,
thoughts racing courses without knowing what
each thing perceived is called not having got
a clue from what those gathered say or said?
Yet though the mind is lost it still has brought
emotion from its living body - fear
of all its organs feel and see and hear
but cannot name in helpless, lonely thought.
Someone will have to close your frightened eyes
and wonder if she’ll panic as she dies.

[RiverNotch]

Knowing that the sleeper you encounter
is a corpse -- the valley's too routine, the morning
too pastoral -- now your head is swarming
with profundity. You flounder
though the ground beneath you is quite solid,
kept together by deep-rooted cover,
and you barely moved. Was he a forlorn lover
or a soldier? Was his passing plotted
or some fateful accident, the panicked
pistol leaving the premier exhibit
of their crime so open? His organic
pose, his gentle smile -- and from a thicket
draws a little highway, velvet traffic
of ants marching to their billet.

[Mark A Becker]

Being at a loss
for words, I did not
say much; at my sister's
or father's, or mother's
or brother's. But I do
stop by every now
and then, to talk
to the wind.

The hardest one yet-
11 year old Jackson,
when cancer attacked his brain.
To see a child suffering
is killing us all. Yet, he fights on
and hope remains.

[busker]

Last Life in Death


What must it be to die unpeacefully,
not recognizing nurse or child or bed–
for mind to live when memory has fled,
to see and move and think  meaninglessly
trapped in a body, whole though nearly dead,
thoughts racing courses without knowing what
each thing perceived is called not having got
a clue from what those gathered say or said?
Yet though the mind is lost it still has brought
emotion from its living body - fear
of all its organs feel and see and hear
but cannot name in helpless, lonely thought.
Someone will have to close your frightened eyes
and wonder if she’ll panic as she dies.

Love this one, duke