Tag Archives: death

‘Maz’ Griffiths, ‘Clogs’

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The Queen Mum’s gorn and popped her clogs;
the telly’s stuffed with Royal progs.
I’ve heard a thousand epilogues
now the old Queen Mum has popped her clogs.

The Queen Mum’s gorn and popped her clogs
so let’s fish out our mourning togs
and toast her name in small eggnogs.
Our dear old Queen Mum’s popped her clogs.

The Queen Mum’s gorn and popped her clogs.
Oh, Gawd, we’ll all go to the dogs,
and princes will turn into frogs
now the old Queen Mum has popped her clogs.

*****

The always delightful Margaret Ann “Maz” Griffiths published in a huge range of voices: formal sonnets of wildlife and of the illness that finally killed her, blank verse rants against warfare or injustice, sad songs of the female loss of innocence, flippant anti-establishment sarcasm about the British Royal Family…

‘Grasshopper’, her 350-page collection of poetry (and also one of her nicknames) was assembled by fans after her death and published by Arrowhead Press in the UK and Able Muse Press in North America. It is readable and rereadable. I post the occasional poem in this blog.

Photo: “Queen Mum Dead” by Joe Shlabotnik is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Using form: iambic trimeter: Janet Kenny, ‘Stars’

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Look at the stars, she said.
Just look how cold and bright!
And most of them are dead
though brightening the night.
Time lives and dies like stars.
The past is death of now.
Impermanence that scars
our fleeting human hour.
The world inside a mind
that dies when we die too
leaves others left behind
resigned without a clue.
Forget me nots deceive
and daisy chains depend
on children who believe
our world will never end.

*****

Janet Kenny writes: “The poet is very old and has been confronted inescapably with the mortality of all things.”

Janet Kenny left New Zealand to pursue a career as an operatic and concert singer in London, then settled in Sydney, Australia, where she worked in the anti-nuclear movement and jointly compiled, wrote and edited a book about the nuclear industry, Beyond Chernobyl, published by Envirobook in 1993. Janet lived for many years in Sydney with her husband and visiting currawongs. She now lives in Hervey Bay, Queensland, with visiting butcher birds, spangled drongos, ospreys, pelicans, assorted honeyeaters and flying foxes.

Her poems have been published in printed and online journals, including Avatar, The Chimaera, Folly, 14 by 14, Iambs & Trochees, The Literary Review, Mi Poesias, The Guardian, The Spectator, The New Formalist, The Barefoot Muse, The Raintown Review, The Shit Creek Review, Snakeskin, Lavender Review, Soundz ine, Victorian Violet Press, The Susquehanna Quarterly and Umbrella. Her work is in the collections The Book of Hope and Filled With Breath: 30 sonnets by 30 poets and in the Outer Space anthology, Cambridge University Press. She shared an anthology of bird poems, Passing Through, with Jerry H. Jenkins. She has received three Pushcart nominations.

A selection of her poems, and links to her poetry collections Whistling in the Dark (2016, Kelsay Books) and This Way to the Exit (White Violet Press), are on her website https://janetkenny.netpublish.net/index.htm

Photo: “Sizzling Remains of a Dead Star” by Euclid vanderKroew is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.


Using form: Jerome Betts, ‘Villanelle For Darcy’

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Darcy the diabetic cat has died
His fans were told by email recently,
A life remembered with no little pride.

The Fiat-driver now feels mortified
To think because he simply failed to see
Darcy, the diabetic cat has died.

Was this the fatal ninth and last he’d tried?
Whichever, it will surely prove to be
A life remembered with no little pride.

His poor squashed frame has been discreetly fried
With all involved expressing sympathy;
Darcy the diabetic cat has died.

The people in his road could not abide
The flattening of such fine felinity,
A life remembered with no little pride.

So, some of them sent cards, and others cried
And stuck a sign upon his favourite tree:
Darcy the diabetic cat has died,
A life remembered with no little pride.

*****

Jerome Betts writes: “It’s always interesting when a line you read sparks off a quite unexpected result. In this case the line was in a friend’s email from Cambridge which mentioned in passing, as an item of local news, that Jasper the diabetic cat has died. Further details followed about one of those neighbourhood favourites known to many more people than its owners. Eventually, with Darcy substituted for Jasper (partly to secure a run of Ds and partly as I was at odds with a garden-molester of that name at the time) a villanelle took shape which was published in Snakeskin and subsequently in the anthology Love Affairs At The Villa Nelle (Kelsay Books, 2018) edited by Marilyn L. Taylor and James P. Roberts.”

Jerome Betts lives in Devon, England, where he edits the quarterly Lighten Up Online. Pushcart-nominated twice, his verse has appeared in a wide variety of UK publications and in anthologies such as Love Affairs At The Villa Nelle, Limerick Nation, The Potcake Chapbooks 1, 2 and 12, and Beth Houston’s three Extreme collections. British, European, and North American web venues include Amsterdam Quarterly, Better Than Starbucks,  Light, The Asses of Parnassus, The Hypertexts, The New Verse News, and Snakeskin.

Photo: “Dead Cat” by Denty One is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Sonnet variation: J.D. Smith, ‘Lullaby for the Bereaved’

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Your hours of tears won’t let you follow
Those who’ve left you alone.
Tonight your head lies on a pillow,
Not beneath earth and stone.

The dead won’t be returning,
Not for all of your pleas,
Not for all your candles burning.
Get up off your knees.

The deceased, removed from their rest
Can take up all your hours
Until your mind, denied a fair rest,
Is deprived of its powers.

The road set before you is rocky and steep,
So seize the night’s respite and drift off to sleep.

*****

J.D. Smith writes: “Though I do not sing, play an instrument or read music, I had Brahms’ Lullaby in the back of my mind while attempting to deal with various losses, and the poem roughly follows its tune. In adjusting to a new reality (I hesitate to say “move on” or “get over,” phrases that smack of empathic failure), sometimes all one can do is rest.”

J.D. Smith has published six books of poetry, most recently the light verse collection Catalogs for Food Lovers, and he has received a Fellowship in Poetry from the United States National Endowment for the Arts. This poem is from The Killing Tree (Finishing Line Press, 2016). Smith’s first fiction collection, Transit, was published in December 2022. His other books include the essay collection Dowsing and Science, and his seventh collection, The Place That Is Coming to Us, will be published by Broadstone Books in 2025. Smith works in Washington, DC, where he lives with his wife Paula Van Lare and their rescue animals.
X: @Smitroverse

Photo: “Grief” by That One Chick Mary is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Helena Nelson, ‘Invitation’

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a homage to Donne’s ‘Nocturnal on St Lucies day’

The shortest day is soon. Time for a pact.
I don’t mean with Saint Lucy (Lucy’s day
falls earlier in the month). But hey
let’s meet and talk and counteract
such darkness of the heart
as coincides with winter’s formal start.
We can read Donne’s ‘Nocturnal’, view its art,
its provenance and what on earth it means.
Location doesn’t matter. We have screens.

Nobody writes a poem now like that —
not something so precise and well controlled.
Of course, we hear what we are told:
the world is round, a rhyme is flat,
‘poetics’ have moved on
and these days no-one wants to write like Donne
who was amazing, right? But dead and gone.
Or not that dead. I’d say he’s still alive
in stanza three and certainly in five.

They call Donne ‘metaphysical’, you know,
a word still popular in jacket blurbs
for living, writing bards where verbs
(or verbiage) propel the flow
but hard now to be sure
whether they mean what Johnson meant. The more
‘meta’ you get with blurbs, the more obscure.
When ‘metaphysical’ foretells a treat
it might be true; it might be mere conceit.

But in ‘Nocturnal’, metaphor leans out
and mystifies. It’s not the usual thing
like glass or compasses or string.
It’s nothing. No thing. Less than nowt.
He says what he is not
in several different ways. In fact, the knot
of nothingness becomes his central plot.
The poet in him can’t forget that ‘none’,
his rhyme for ‘run’, echoes both ‘sun’ and ‘Donne’.

So he’s the sum of everything he feels:
annihilated by the loss of one
without whom he is not a man,
just numb. And yet he still appeals
to logic to make clear
how dark existence is. Yes, she was dear.
Each syllable recounts her loss, his fear,
and this is now and then and now, since this
both the year’s and the day’s deep midnight is.

*****

Helena Nelson writes: “In 1617 when, after the death of his wife, John Donne wrote ‘A nocturnall upon S. Lucies day, Being the shortest day’, St Lucy’s Day coincided with the winter solstice in the author’s hemisphere. Then they changed the calendar, and these days, Saint Lucy’s Day is 13 December. But the winter solstice falls over a week later (this year 21 December).

“Every year on the solstice, I think about John Donne’s solstice poem, every year it gets more apposite, since it is essentially about death. Last year, I did a formal online discussion about it, and I wrote an invitation using the form that is Donne’s, though obviously for a less serious purpose. It allowed me to think it through. I’m thinking about the poem again today, so here’s the invitation.”

Helena Nelson runs HappenStance Press (now winding down) and also writes poems. Her most recent collection is Pearls (The Complete Mr and Mrs Philpott Poems). She reviews widely and is Consulting Editor for The Friday Poem.

Photo: “John Donne, Poet” by lisby1 is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.

Sonnet: Matthew Buckley Smith, ‘Youth’

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I miss believing that I’ll never die,
Or is it that there won’t be a tomorrow?
Both lines work out about the same: deny
The day you’ll have to pay back what you borrow.
It used to be I never went to bed
A second night with any girl I found.
No breakfast in those days–a smoke instead,
Then out the door before she came around.
Last night I passed a toppled garbage bin,
Its liner sagging with a rat’s remains.
He sank a little when I squinted in
And seemed embarrassed by his greedy pains.
And so much like a man, the way he sat
Still in his death, and so much like a rat.

*****

Matthew Buckley Smith writes: “I wrote most of Dirge” (his first book of verse, winner of the 2011 Able Muse Book Award. – Ed.) “in a summer. I was wading through a bad depression, and having written almost nothing but free verse to that point, I set myself the challenge of writing one sonnet a day for the rest of the summer. ‘Youth’ is a survivor of that experiment, written while walking late at night through the campus of Johns Hopkins on the way to the apartment of the woman who is now my wife.”

Matthew Buckley Smith is the author of Midlife (Measure, 2024) and Dirge for an Imaginary World (Able Muse, 2012). He hosts the poetry podcast SLEERICKETS and serves as Poetry Editor of Literary Matters.
https://www.matthewbuckleysmith.com/

Photo: “rats” by Lance McCord is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Sonnet: Janice D. Soderling, ‘September Morning’

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Across a sun-lit pane, deft, unconcerned,
a spider struts the steps of an old dance,
a set design, in no part happenstance:
and I again to sun and rune returned.
Stumbling along, half blind, half deaf, half-learned,
in yet a day of quarrel and circumstance,
I turn from cluttered web to view askance
night’s daughter, she who never can be turned.

Sleek spider dame with one plan, to consume,
to suck the juice from each unwary fly,
with no grand need to query or presume
if there was meaning in your quarry’s sigh.
Here, in the corner of my fog-filled room,
Atropos grins, her scissors lifted high.

*****

Janice D. Soderling writes: “I don’t write much these days, preferring to use the shortening days to read. But I woke up this morning with the last two lines in my head, and knowing it was an ending to a sonnet, I proceeded to write the rest. Perhaps it asks too much of the reader. Perhaps it is a pretentious piece, of interest only to me. Never mind, I shall keep it, having poured three hours into it.”

Janice D. Soderling has published poems, fiction and translations in hundreds of print and online journals and anthologies over the years. Her most recent poetry collection is ‘Rooms and Closets‘ available at all online bookshops.

Photo: “Spider In Window” by trekkie313 is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Sonnet: RHL, ‘Zombies and Wolves’

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Women I’ve failed or wronged or left behind
approach my thoughts like zombies for the kill;
I’ve literary walled defences – still
given the chance, they’ll eat my brains, my mind.

Through forest, orchard, farmyard in decay,
a shadow of a wolf slips greyly in,
my thoughts of death, grim, wasted, ill, rib-thin,
tracking my weak resolve, hungry to slay.

Mountaintops blown apart, forests clear-cut,
where’s there to hide? Nature doesn’t exist;
her landscapes crushed in patriarchal fist.
This former farmland hides my ruined hut.

Impotent, I still write, thus giving birth
to future wolves and zombies of the earth.

*****

This sonnet was originally published in Candelabrum (a twice-yearly print magazine of formal verse that ran bravely from 1970 to 2010… now sadly defunct, eaten by wolves or zombies or whatever snacks on print poetry magazines), and republished in Bewildering Stories #1039, a decades-old online magazine of primarily speculative fiction.

Photo: “Full ‘Wolf’ Moon – January 22, 2008” by Rick Leche is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Semi-formal: RHL, ‘Terminal’

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Christian culture’s crucifixation
nails us to our seats as, station by station,
we travel the trammelled line
until we find
that terminal
more primal.

The humanstrain’s end-of-line stop
is Ragnarok.
Everyone please disembark
into the dark–
no light, no map.
Mind the Ginnungagap.

*****

This is as close as I get to religion: existential uncertainty. I’m a Militant Agnostic: “I don’t know… and neither do you!” Yet this attitude is apparently compatible with religion, being not that different from Eliot’s ‘East Coker‘:
O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters
(…)
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God.
But Christianity? I think not. Altogether too unlikely, with so many impossibilities packed into such a small understanding of the cosmos. We don’t know where we are headed, not just as individuals with finite lives, but as a species that is simultaneously developing space travel and genetic modifications… the possibilities are endless and the future, dark as well as light, is unknowable.

The poem is semi-formal with its loose iambics and paired rhymes or slant rhymes, but no structure beyond its natural flow. It was originally published in the Experimental section of a 2019 issue of Better Than Starbucks, and republished as part of work being spotlighted in The HyperTexts in August 2024.

Photo: “London Holborn tube station in Black and White effect” by Patrick Cannon Tax Barrister is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Sonnet: Gail White, ‘The Way It Ended’

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So time went by and they were middle-aged,
which seemed a cruel joke that time had played
on two young lovers. They were newly caged
canary birds – amused, not yet afraid.
A golden anniversary came around
where jokes were made and laughing stories told.
The lovers joined the laugh, although they found
the joke – though not themselves – was growing old.
She started losing and forgetting things.
Where had she left her keys, put down her comb?
Her thoughts were like balloons with broken strings.
Daily he visited the nursing home
to make her smile and keep her in their game.
Death came at last. But old age never came.

*****

Gail White writes: “Time is the strangest of the conditions we live in.  Scientists, essayists, and poets can ring endless changes on this theme.  Time has devastated the lives of the couple in this sonnet, but as Solomon told us long ago, love is as strong as death.”

Gail White is the resident poet and cat lady of Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. Her books ASPERITY STREET and CATECHISM are available on Amazon. She is a contributing editor to Light Poetry Magazine. “Tourist in India” won the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award for 2013. Her poems have appeared in the Potcake Chapbooks ‘Tourists and Cannibals’, ‘Rogues and Roses’, ‘Families and Other Fiascoes’, ‘Strip Down’ and ‘Lost Love’. ‘The Way It Ended’ was first published in 14 by 14 (which has also ended…) and is collected in her chapbook, ‘Sonnets in a Hostile World‘, also available on Amazon.

Photo: “young couple being photographed at the beach” by phlubdr is licensed under CC BY 2.0.