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Back Poems and Readings for Funerals Save as PDF
Chapters (98)
  1. Cover
  2. About the Author
  3. Foreword
  4. REMEMBER ME WHEN I AM GONE AWAY …
  5. ‘Remember me when I am gone away’
  6. Heaven-Haven
  7. Life Goes On
  8. Living Each Day
  9. ‘Death is nothing at all’
  10. Remember Me
  11. ‘I’m here for a short visit only’
  12. ‘No longer mourn for me when I am dead’
  13. If Death is Kind
  14. Fare Well
  15. When I Died
  16. ‘Because I could not stop for Death’
  17. ‘I see myself now at the end of my journey’
  18. Requiem
  19. ‘I thought I’d write my own obituary’
  20. Think of Me Then
  21. The New Path
  22. Footprints in the Sand
  23. The Book
  24. The Legacy
  25. ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever’
  26. When I Have Fears
  27. A Song of Living
  28. ‘I should like to be buried in a summer forest’
  29. ‘I would not have a god come in’
  30. I’ve Made Out a Will
  31. Coda
  32. Rest
  33. Prayer
  34. A TINY LAMP HAS GONE OUT IN MY TENT …
  35. ‘You must not shut the night inside you’
  36. Prayer for the Little Daughter between Death and Burial
  37. Epitaph on a Child
  38. On the Death of a Child
  39. Four Candles
  40. Too Soon
  41. Requiescat
  42. ‘Promise you won’t forget about me, ever’
  43. HE WAS MY NORTH, MY SOUTH, MY EAST AND WEST …
  44. Funeral Blues
  45. ‘Music, when soft voices die’
  46. ‘As birds are fitted to the boughs’
  47. Farewell, Sweet Dust
  48. Echo
  49. The Kaleidoscope
  50. Verses Written on Her Deathbed at Bath to Her Husband in London
  51. A Widow’s Hymn
  52. ‘Time does not bring relief’
  53. Tomorrows
  54. ‘Never more will the wind’
  55. Marriage and Death
  56. Inseparable
  57. ‘Dear gentle soul, who went so soon away’
  58. In Memoriam E. S.
  59. WORN FEATURES OF ANCESTRAL MOULD …
  60. Highland Graveyard
  61. ‘Another and another and another’
  62. ‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun’
  63. ‘By ways remote and distant waters sped’
  64. ‘Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore’
  65. Elegy
  66. I Wish You Enough
  67. While I Slept
  68. ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’
  69. Coat
  70. ‘The rooms and days we wandered through’
  71. The Friend
  72. ‘You can shed tears that she is gone’
  73. Inside Our Dreams
  74. Traditional Gaelic Blessing
  75. TO EVERY THING THERE IS A SEASON …
  76. ‘To every thing there is a season’
  77. ‘Our revels now are ended’
  78. So Many Different Lengths of Time
  79. ‘Come, fill the Cup’
  80. ‘Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth’
  81. ‘Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels’
  82. ‘Death be not proud’
  83. ‘Home is where one starts from’
  84. Dirge without Music
  85. ‘don’t tell me that I mourn too much’
  86. All Things Pass
  87. Earth
  88. On Death
  89. Gone from My Sight
  90. The Wheel
  91. Live Your Life
  92. Prayer
  93. Old Irish Toast
  94. For My Own Tomb-stone
  95. Notes
  96. Acknowledgements
  97. JULIA WATSON
  98. THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING

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;

Gently they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave

I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

Edna St Vincent Millay (1892–1950)

‘don’t tell me that I mourn too much’

don’t tell me that I mourn too much

and I won’t tell you that you mourn too much

don’t tell me that I mourn too little

and I won’t tell you that you mourn too little

don’t tell me that I mourn in the wrong place

and I won’t tell you that you mourn in the wrong place

don’t tell me that I mourn at the wrong time

and I won’t tell you that you mourn at the wrong time

don’t tell me that I mourn in the wrong way

and I won’t tell you that you mourn in the wrong way

I may get it wrong, I will get it wrong, I have got it wrong but don’t tell me

Michael Rosen (1946–)

All Things Pass

All things pass

A sunrise does not last all morning

All things pass

A cloudburst does not last all day

All things pass

Nor a sunset all night

All things pass

What always changes?

Earth… sky… thunder…

mountain… water…

wind… fire… lake…

These change

And if these do not last

Do man’s visions last?

Do man’s illusions?

Take things as they come

All things pass

from the Tao Te Ching, Lao-Tzu

(6th century BC), translated from

the Chinese by Timothy Leary

Earth

Let the day grow on you upward

through your feet,

the vegetal knuckles,

to your knees of stone,

until by evening you are a black tree;

feel, with evening,

the swifts thicken your hair,

the new moon rising out of your forehead,

and the moonlit veins of silver

running from your armpits

like rivulets under white leaves.

Sleep, as ants

cross over our eyelids.

You have never possessed anything

as deeply as this.

This is all you have owned

from the first outcry

through forever;

you can never be dispossessed.

Derek Walcott (1930–)

On Death

Then Almitra spoke, saying, We would ask now of Death.

And he said:

You would know the secret of death.

But how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heart of life?

The owl whose night-bound eyes are blind unto the day cannot unveil the mystery of light.

If you would indeed behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide unto the body of life.

For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.

In the depth of your hopes and desires lies your silent knowledge of the beyond;