Death Alone

There are lone cemeteries,

tombs full of soundless bones,

the heart threading a tunnel,

a dark, dark tunnel:

like a wreak we die to the very core,

as if drowning at the heart

or collapsing inwards from skin to soul.

There are corpses,

clammy slabs for feet,

there is death in the bones,

like a pure sound,

a bark without its dog,

out of certain bells, certain tombs

swelling in this humidity like lament or rain.

I see, when alone at times,

coffins under sail

setting out with the pale dead,

women in their dead braids,

bakers as white as angels,

thoughtful girls married to notaries,

coffins ascending the vertical river of the dead,

the wine-dark river to its source,

with their sails swollen with the sound of death,

filled with the silent noise of death.

Death is drawn to sound

like a slipper without a foot, a suit without its wearer,

comes to knock with a ring, stoneless and fingerless,

comes to shout without a mouth, a tongue, without a throat.

Nevertheless its footsteps sound

and its clothes echo, hushes like a tree.

I do not know, I am ignorant, I hardly see

but it seems to me that it's song has the color of wet violets

violets well used to the earth,

since the face of death is green,

and the gaze of death is green with the etched moisture of a violet's leaf

and its grave color of exasperated winter

-Pablo Neruda

Death

Come thou, thou last one, whom I recognize,

unbearable pain throughout this body's fabric:

as I in my spirit burned, see, I now burn in thee:

the wood that long resisted the advancing flames

which thou kept flaring, I now an nourishing

and burn in thee.

My gentle and mild being through thy ruthless fury

has turned into a raging hell that is not from here.

Quite pure, quite free of future planning, I mounted

the tangled funeral pyre built for my suffering,

so sure of nothing more to buy for future needs,

while in my heart the stored reserves kept silent.

Is it still I, who there past all recognition burn?

Memories I do not seize and bring inside.

O life! O living! O to be outside!

And I in flames,

And no one here who knows me.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

Requiem

So madness now has wrapped its wings

Round half my soul and plies me, heartless,

With draughts of fiery wine, begins

To lure me towards the vale of darkness.

And I can see that I must now

Concede the victory -as I listen,

The dream that dogged my fevered brow

Already seems an outside vision.

And though I go on bended knee

To plead, implore its intercession,

There's nothing I may take with me,

It countenances no concession:

Nor yet my son's distracted eyes-

The rock-like suffering rooted in them,

The day the storm broke from clear skies,

The hour spent visiting the prison,

Nor yet the kind, cool clasp of hands,

The lime-tree shadows' fitful darting,

the far light call across the land-

The soothing words exchanged on parting.

-Anna Akhmatova

Gacela of the Dark Death

I want to sleep the dream of the apples,

to withdraw from the tumult of cemeteries.

I want to sleep the dream of that child

who wanted to cut his heart on the high seas.

I don't want to hear again that the dead do not lose their blood,

that the putrid mouth goes on asking for water.

I don't want to learn of the tortures of the grass,

nor of the moon with a serpent's mouth

that labors before dawn.

I want to sleep awhile,

awhile, a minute, a century;

but all must know that I have not died;

that there is a stable of gold in my lips;

that I am the small friend of the west wing;

that I am the intense shadows of my tears.

Cover me at dawn with a veil,

because dawn will throw fistfuls of ants at me,

and wet with hard water my shoes

so that the pincers of the scorpion slide.

For I want to sleep the dream of the apples,

to learn a lament that will cleanse me to the earth;

For I want to live with that dark child

who wanted to cut his heart on the high seas.

-Federico Garcia Lorca