This year to celebrate National Poetry Month and to take part in the April A-Z Blogging Challenge, I’ll be posting two poems a day, one written by me and another poem written by one of my favourite poets. The title or first word of both poems will begin with the corresponding letter in the Blogging Challenge.
Today I offer you two sorrowful poems, Funeral Blues, By W. H. Auden, which is a poem about sorrow and mourning due to the loss of a loved one, and Fifty-One, which I wrote in October 2014, when my sister would have celebrated her 51st birthday.
Fifty-One
You would have been 51 today.
I would have phoned.
You would have said ‘Hi, Lil!’
We would have chatted,
And laughed, and gossiped.
Hours later,
‘I would have said, ‘Bye, El!’
It would have been so special.
Nobody else would have understood
Our made-up language,
Our private jokes,
Our childhood fears,
Our secret dreams…
I wouldn’t have written this poem with brine,
If you hadn’t ripped a piece of my heart
When you left.
If you hadn’t been unlawfully killed,
You would have been 51 today.
****
****
Funeral Blues / Stop All the Clocks
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
****
Check out an analysis of the poem here and more information on Auden here.
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