Tag Archives: death

Ballade: Gail White, ‘After the Opera’

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Although we came in hopes to find
the most amazing staging yet,
the final act still filled the mind
with all the trappings of regret.
Although the happy lovers met
with joyous singing – hers and his –
we’ve seen from Carmen to Cosette
how sad the ending always is.

Why do we cry for womankind,
for Tosca on the parapet,
for Butterfly, her love declined,
for Manon and for Juliet?
Haven’t we seen the sweetest pet
fall victim to the wily Wiz?
Haven’t we seen – from death to debt –
how sad the ending always is?

The villain always lurks behind
the arras, holding out the net
that will entrap the golden hind,
the mark of arrows ready set.
At first we didn’t feel the threat;
we never thought our hopes a chiz,
But now we’ve learned our alphabet:
How sad the ending always is!

But pour champagne, my friends, and let
the golden bubbles rise and fizz!
For just a moment we’ll forget
how sad the ending always is.

*****

Gail White writes: “It was Barbara Loots who called my attention to the fact that the plots of many operas could end with the words “and then she dies.”  Being an opera heroine is almost always fatal.  My first poem on this theme was a short one,  “Opera Rondeau”.  Then it occurred to me that the same idea would support a ballade.  Writing this was fun, as finding enough rhymes for “is” pushed me into the realm of slang.  And, of course, life is indeed a process of finding happy distractions from an inevitable tragic ending.”

‘After the Opera’ was first published in Pulsebeat Poetry Journal.

Gail White is a widely published Formalist poet and a contributing editor to Light. Her new chapbook, Paper Cuts, is out on Amazon or from Kelsay Books. She lives in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, with her husband and cats.

“This picture makes me happy” by James Jordan is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.

Sonnet: John Gallas, ‘Ascension Sonnet’

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you can’t unload the caravan for one lame donkey

It’s six a.m. We’re swarming up a drain.
Someone up the front knows what we’re doing.
Me and Tich are flying up the flueing.
Snap! My leg falls off. You can’t complain:
you can’t expect an army on the trail
of half a dog and sugar-sick to stop
and say Oh dear, Goodbye. I squirm and flop
along the gutter’s edge. A wizened snail
laced up in cobwebs grins across the slime.
I hear a million footsteps fading. Tich!
The sun smacks like a snare-drum. Life’s a bitch.
My head goes dry. I’m running out of Time.
I climb a twig to face the Ant Unknown.
We have to face our last few pricks alone.

*****

John Gallas writes: “Ascension: a slightly cruel Proverb to modern ears, but of course often the case as we all bustle forwards in life. The sad demise of this Ant is done in a cod-Existential drama, and tries to mix some black humour with the Final Stand (even with a leg missing). The also-once-left-behind snail a warning to us all. Who knows how Ants talk, but they are sociable, so …”

Ascension Sonnet is one of the 100 sonnets collected in The Coalville Divan (part of John Gallas’ ‘Star City’ from Carcanet), which use as their beginnings Persian Proverbs from the Wisdom of the East series by L.P. Elwell-Sutton.

John Gallas, Aotearoa/NZ poet, published mostly by Carcanet. Saxonship Poet (see www.saxonship.org), Fellow of the English Association, St Magnus Festival Orkney Poet, librettist, translator and biker. 2025 Midlands Writing Prize winner. Presently living in Markfield, Leicestershire. Website is www.johngallaspoetry.co.uk which has a featured Poem of the Month, complete book list, links and news.  

“Trail of Ants” by McLevn is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

J.E. Flecker, ‘The Golden Journey to Samarkand. Prologue’

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We who with songs beguile your pilgrimage
And swear that Beauty lives though lilies die,
We Poets of the proud old lineage
Who sing to find your hearts, we know not why,–

What shall we tell you? Tales, marvellous tales
Of ships and stars and isles where good men rest,
Where nevermore the rose of sunset pales,
And winds and shadows fall toward the West:

And there the world’s first huge white-bearded kings
In dim glades sleeping, murmur in their sleep,
And closer round their beasts the ivy clings,
Cutting its pathway slow and red and deep.

II
And how beguile you? Death has no repose
Warmer and deeper than that Orient sand
Which hides the beauty and bright faith of those
Who made the Golden Journey to Samarkand.

And now they wait and whiten peaceably,
Those conquerors, those poets, those so fair:
They know time comes, not only you and I,
But the whole world shall whiten, here or there;

When those long caravans that cross the plain
With dauntless feet and sound of silver bells
Put forth no more for glory or for gain,
Take no more solace from the palm-girt wells,

When the great markets by the sea shut fast
All that calm Sunday that goes on and on:
When even lovers find their peace at last,
And Earth is but a star, that once had shone.

*****

Following on from my previous blog post on James Elroy Flecker, this is the Prologue to ‘The Golden Journey to Samarkand’. It has some nice lines, but the piece that contains the stirring lines that get quoted and misquoted and truncated out of context, that piece is the Epilogue, which I will post next time.


Painting by Richard-Karl Karlovič Zommer: ‘Samarkand’ (19th/ 20th century)

Richard Fleming, ‘The Prayer’

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I remember the cold, high-ceilinged room
where they had laid him, the smell of incense,
brass coffin handles shining in the gloom,
an aspidistra, dusty and immense.

To this small boy dressed in a mourning suit,
he seemed reduced, much less than he once was:
his scalp, without his cap, bald as a coot,
his fingers criss-crossed on his chest like claws.

I thought back to the day we watched geese rise
high over wetlands blurred with morning haze,
the laughter always dancing in his eyes,
his warm, familiar smell, his turn of phrase.

Life is so short while memories are long.
We the bereaved are left with words unsaid.
At the day’s end, he’d sing a lulling song
as I rode his strong shoulders home to bed.

A prayer unbidden reached me on a whim:
Preserve in me the things I loved in him.

*****

Richard Fleming writes: “This is a shortened, rhyming version of a lengthy free verse poem that I wrote over thirty years ago when I relocated to Guernsey from Northern Ireland. Like many love poems, the original version, The Hidden Traveller, has stood the test of time. This version stands as a homage to its source.”

Richard Fleming is an Irish-born poet and humorist based in Guernsey, a Channel Island between Britain and France. Widely regarded as one of the island’s foremost literary voices, his versatile work blends lyricism, sharp wit, emotional depth, and a strong sense of place. Drawing from his Northern Irish roots and adopted home, his poetry and prose explore love, loss, nostalgia, identity, and modern life. Collections include Strange Journey (2012), held in the National Poetry Library, and Stone Witness (Blue Ormer) featuring the BBC-commissioned title poem. His work can be found on
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/richard.fleming.92102564/
or Bard at Bay www.redhandwriter.blogspot.com


My own favourites: Sonnet: RHL, ‘Death Will Be Harsher Now’

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Death will be harsher now, as, year by year,
we solve the clues of immortality:
emotions sink to animality
as false hopes tighten screws of desperate fear.
Hormone control will make age disappear—
after false starts, most horrible to see—
but those already old must beg to be
frozen for the genetic engineer.
While war, starvation, pipe Earth’s gruesome jigs,
successful businessmen will fight to gain
some dead teen’s body, to transplant their brain,
the already-old beg to be guinea-pigs.
Children, look back, hear our despairing cry:
we bred immortals, but we had to die!

*****

I wrote this poem on 3 January 1982 – twenty years before I began to get poems published. (Formal verse was an almost absolute no-no in late 20th century magazines… although consistently taught and highly praised in schools and universities, of course.) It was finally published in Ambit in October 2007 – the magazine started and managed for 50 years by Martin Bax and the stomping ground of J.G. Ballard, Ralph Steadman, Carol Ann Duffy, etc.

In April 2018 the poem was reprinted in Bewildering Stories, an online weekly headquartered in Guelph, Ontario; and in 2024 I accepted Maryann Corbett‘s suggestion to change the title and first line and instead of “harder” use the word “harsher”… the earlier word incorrectly suggesting that we might be finding it more difficult to achieve death.

The ideas behind the poem were not new to science fiction, but were less common in formal verse. The ideas continue to inch their way towards reality; continue to be explored in popular culture (Piraro, Futurama…); and in the last 44 years I have continued to explore SF and existential themes in verse.


Cartoon: “piraro brain transplant” by Dreaming in the deep south is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Semi-formal Sonnet: Rachel Hadas, ‘Out of Reach’

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Our lost ones drift down a dark stream,
surfacing at the brink of dream.
The crack of dawn: they’re gone again.
What have they left for us to keep?
Night’s dialect, a coded speech
beyond our reach.

Birds on the bank of a calm pond:
each one is still and poised, then dives.
Mornings we wake into our lives,
blind to what lies beyond, below,
the chasms where black rivers flow,
and flickering deeper, darkly clear,
that coded speech beyond our reach,
words we can’t hear.

*****

Rachel Hadas has a group of sonnets appearing, one a week, in The Sonneteer. For the first she wrote: “The sonnets that will be appearing in the coming weeks weren’t conceived as a sequence. Encouraged by Ken Gordon’s enthusiasm to take a look at some of my unpublished shorter poems, I speedily found one fourteen-liner, “Tectonic Plates.” Three other poems were so close to sonnet length that they almost begged to be tweaked or tightened or gently expanded; this group includes “Out of Reach,” “Winter,” and “My Best Friend’s Mother.” In every case, the sonnetification (Ken’s helpful coinage) improved the poem. (…) I now realize that, while not conceived as a sequence, all five of these sonnets (now that they are all sonnets) do share themes. They’re about time and memory, aging and loss, what we lose and what we retain. So are many other sonnets, infinitely greater than mine. It’s a privilege to be able to join in the conversation, to swell the chorus.“

Rachel Hadas (born November 8, 1948) is an American poet, teacher, essayist, and translator. Her most recent essay collection is Piece by Piece: Selected Prose (Paul Dry Books, 2021), and her most recent poetry collection is Ghost Guest (Ragged Sky Press, 2023). Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Ingram Merrill Foundation Grants, the O.B. Hardison Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

https://www.rachelhadas.net/

Photo: “Kingfisher fishing” by Bob Hall Photos is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Sonnet: Jerome Betts, ‘Fly-By’

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(For S. H. W.)

Bench slats, warm-sleeved in lichen’s rough grey-green,
Sandwiches, ivy’s shade, the garden scene,
Dozens of white-tailed bumblebees, a hum
Among the clustered heads of marjoram.

Background to thoughts that intertwine and drift . . .
A sudden sombre sickle shape – a swift
So low, so near, not distant in the sky,
Skims past, a flash of wings and beak and eye.

Why come that strangely close? Drawn down in chase
Of food, despite the human form and face?
Why did it circle once, then speed away
Towards the woods and cliffs that fringe Lyme Bay?

Soon, news – an old friend gone whose joy was birds.
It almost seemed a farewell without words.

*****

Jerome Betts writes: “The passage of the swift so close I could glimpse its shining eye was a memorable moment in these times when I see only a very occasional two or three usually high in the sky. It resulted in a sunny and summery ten lines concluding, A brief encounter, but it made the day. Some hours later the news came of an old school friend’s death in France. This completely altered any feeling about the event. I suppose the subtext of the aftermath was something like Hardy’s Hoping it might be so, which nearly became the title.”  

‘Fly-By’ was first published in Snakeskin.

Jerome Betts edits Lighten Up Online in Devon, England. His verse appears in Amsterdam Quarterly, Light, The Asses of Parnassus, The New Verse News, The Hypertexts, Snakeskin, and various anthologies.

Photo: “Swift (Apus apus)” by Billy Lindblom is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Short poem: RHL, ‘Clearing the Cache’

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At night we dream to clean our memory,
discard trash from our cache.
Reincarnating after death would be the same;
the past, scraped by death’s emery,
unknown in the new game,
cleansed of our memories, but with a stash
of added skills…
and karma’s unpaid bills.

*****

No, I don’t believe in reincarnation. I don’t believe in anything, or in nothing; I’m an absolute agnostic. “I think therefore I am” is as far as you can go with any certainty – even “who or what I am” is ultimately unknown.

‘Clearing the Cache’ was published in Bewildering Stories. Thanks, Don Webb (if you exist, of course…)

“Glitch 183” by mikrosopht [deleted] is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Short Poem: Andrew Sclater, ‘Dear Mother’

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Dear Mother come softly across your grey veil
and onto the path in the dark where the snail
is crossing obliquely and nightjars sing sweetly
and put down your toilet bag quietly, discreetly
on the rim of the cemetery fountain. Now wash
your hair free of this mud and these worms, and squash
those white maggots that gleam in your ears,
then smile as you used to. We’ll have no more tears.

*****

Andrew Sclater writes: “I think everyone who loses a parent probably wants to resurrect them somehow. But memory is a false friend. We can’t see them clearly enough: we know, with vagueness, what they were like, but not who they were. We’d like to go back but we can’t, though this poems attempts to. Then, the realisation that we stand alone, orphaned, comes slowly, painfully and (awkward as it is) angrily as we grieve. This poem was delivered almost complete to me. It simply flowed out of the first line in a rare and rather magical way. I still like it more than almost everything I’ve written, placing my discomfort so tidily into its formal box.”

‘Dear Mother’ first appeared in Poetry Review.

Andrew Sclater is a Scottish poet currently living in Paris. He has published poems in Ambit, Best Scottish Poems, The Dark Horse, Magma, New Writing Scotland, Poetry Review, Shearsman and elsewhere. He co-founded Butcher’s Dog poetry magazine and the National Botanic Garden of Wales. He has been an editor of Charles Darwin’s correspondence and his Dinner at the Blaws-Baxters’ was published in 2016 by HappenStance Press. His newest pamphlet Quite Joyful is from Mariscat Press.

Photo: “.a…d.i.s.t.a.n.t…memory.” by DeeAshley is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Johnny Longfellow, ‘Epitaph’

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If you’re dead, an’ ya’ ain’t on a mantle,
Then ya’ go in a hole in the groun’.
From a slab to a coffin, ya’ don’t move very often.
When you’re dead you’re jus’ lyin’ aroun’. 

If you’re dead, an’ you’re hauled to a graveyard,
A few fam’ly ‘n’ friends might arrive,
An’ the buzzards ‘ll buzz up above ya’ because
When you’re dead you’re no longer alive.

If you’re dead, there’ll be those who hol’ Judgment—
Say your Soul is in Heaven or Hell;
But Whatever is True (an’ regardless o’ you)
When you’re dead, that’s their story to tell.

If you’re dead . . . well, ain’t none o’ that matters.
It’s the livin’ who toss in the dirt.
What remains goes to rot. An’ though like it or not
When you’re dead ya’ don’t feel any hurt.

*****

Johnny writes: “Inspired—in part, at least—by my interest in gravestones of the Colonial era, ‘Epitaph’ utilizes a second person voice. A tip of the hat, if you will, to the ‘As I am now, so you must be’ subgenre of epitaph, wherein the dead address the living to forewarn of Death’s inevitability. Seven stanzas too long at one point, I chopped it down to four. Reason being, the three stanzas I rather begrudgingly removed were written in a confessional mode that conflicted not just with the second person voice, but also with the Everyman vibe that I began sensing the Muse actually desired from me, along with greater brevity. Having made such cuts, I shelved the piece, thinking I’d revisit it in the future with a fresh(er) set of eyes. But then, a recent, troubling news event and its subsequent media fallout brought ‘Epitaph’ to the forefront of my mind. So, on a whim, I posted the abridged version on Facebook. To my pleasant surprise, that led to Robin querying me about its availability, and ultimately, its appearance here at Form in Formless Times.”

Johnny Longfellow is a poet from Massachusetts. His work has appeared in The Five-Two, The Literary Hatchet, Misery Tourism, Punk Noir, and other fine literary venues. You can learn more about both him and his work at Heeeeeeere’s Johnny . . . Longfellow, that is.

Photo: “Susanna Jayne” by In Memoriam: Mr. Ducke is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

https://newenglandfolklore.blogspot.com/2022/03/the-grave-of-susanna-jayne-bats-angels.html