Poetry About Losing a Friend (For Grieving Times)

Poetry About Losing A Friend – When a friend or family member dies, often whether you practice a religion or not the power of words will help you grieve.

Poetry About Losing a Friend

It can be difficult to know how to handle a friend’s death. For the loss of a family member, people typically send cards or condolence messages.

But not every time you lose a friend, you’ll experience the same level of sympathy. It can be a rather alone situation. Poetry About Losing a Friend provides some sense of comfort.

Here is a compilation of Poetry About Losing a Friend that might comfort you and make you feel connected through a difficult period.

1. “But Not Forgotten”

I think, no matter where you stray,
That I shall go with you a way.
Though you may wander sweeter lands,
You will not soon forget my hands,
Nor yet the way I held my head,
Nor all the tremulous things I said.

You still will see me,
small and white and smiling,
On the secret night,
And feel my arms about you
when the day comes fluttering back again.
I think, no matter where you are,
You’ll hold me in your memory and keep my image,
there without me,By telling later loves about me.

by Dorothy Parker

2. “No. 101 (On His Brother’s Death)”

Byways remote and distant waters sped,
Brother, to thy sad grave-side am I come,
That I may give the last gifts to the dead,
And vainly parley with thine ashes dumb:
Since she who now bestows and now denies Hath ta’en thee,
hapless brother, from mine eyes.

But lo! these gifts,
the heirlooms of past years,
Are made sad things to grace thy coffin shell;
Take them, all drenched with a brother’s tears,
And, brother,
for all time, hail and farewell!

by Gaius Valerius Catullus

3. “Change of Address”

You didn’t die you just changed shape
became invisible to the naked eye
became this grief
it’s sharpness more real
than your presence was
before you were separate

to me entire to yourself
now you are part of me
you are inside my self
I call you by your new name
‘Grief…Grief!’
although I still call you Love.’

by Dónall Dempsey

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4. “The Scattering”

I cast you into the waters .Be lake, or random moon.
Be first light ,lifting up its beggar’s cup.
I scatter your ashes. Be the gale teaching autumn to mend its ways,
or leopard so proud of his spotted coat.
Be the mentor of cherry trees.
I cast your dust far and wide,a sower broadcasting seed:

Be wild rose or hellebore or all-heal.
Descend as a vein of silver,never to be seen,
deep in the lynx-eyed earth.
Rise as barn owl white as dusk;
dove or raven marvelling at his flight.
Know different delights.

by Penelope Shuttle

5. “Epitaph on a Friend”

An honest man here lies at rest,

The friend of man, the friend of truth,

The friend of age, and guide of youth:

Few hearts like his, with virtue warm’d,

Few heads with knowledge so inform’d;

If there’s another world, he lives in bliss;

If there is none,

he made the best of this.

by Robert Burns

6. “Funeral Blues”

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 crepe 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 forever: 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.

by W. H. Auden

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7. “Darling”

You might forget the exact sound of her voice
Or how her face looked when sleeping.
You might forget the sound of her
quiet weeping curled into the shape of a half moon,
When smaller than her self,
she seemed already to be leaving before she left,
when the blossom was on the trees and the sun was out,
and all seemed good in the world.

I held her hand and sang a song from when I was a girl –
Heil Ya Ho Boys,
Let her go Boys And when I stopped singing she had slipped away,
Already a slip of a girl again,
skipping off, her heart light, her face almost smiling.
And what I didn’t know or couldn’t see then was that she hadn’t really gone.
The dead don’t go till you do, loved ones.
The dead are still here holding our hands.

by Jackie Kay

8. “Grief”

Trying to remember you is like carrying watering
my hands a long distance across sand.
Somewhere people are waiting.
They have drunk nothing for days.
Your name was the food I lived on;
now my mouth is full of dirt and ash.

To say your name was to be surrounded by feathers and silk;
now, reaching out,I touch glass and barbed wire.
Your name was the thread connecting my life;
now I am fragments on a tailor’s floor.
I was dancing when I learned of your death;
may my feet be severed from my body.

by Stephen Dobyns

9. “Cold”

It felt so cold, the snowball which wept in my hands,
and when I rolled it along in the snow,
it grew till I could sit on it,
looking back at the house,
where it was cold when I woke in my room,
the windows blind with ice,
my breath undressing itself on the air.

Cold, too, embracing the torso of snow
which I lifted up in my arms to build a snowman,
my toes, burning, cold in my winter boots;
my mother’s voice calling me infrom the cold.
And her hands were cold from peeling then dipping potatoes into a bowl,
stopping to cup her daughter’s face,

a kiss for both cold cheeks,
my cold nose.But nothing so cold as the February night
I opened the door in the Chapel of Rest where my mother lay,
neither young, nor old,where my lips,
returning her kiss to her brow,
knew the meaning of cold.

by Carol Ann Duffy

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10. “Time Does Not Bring Relief”

Time does not bring relief;
you all have lied Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year’s bitter loving must remain Heaped on my heart,
and my old thoughts abide.

There are a hundred places where I fear To go –
so with his memory they brim.
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face I say,
‘There is no memory of him here!’
And so stand stricken, so remembering him.

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

11. “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rage at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning
they Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by,
crying how bright their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

by Dylan Thomas

12. “Bustle In a House”

The bustle in a house the morning after death

Is solemnest of industries enacted upon earth.

The sweeping up the heart and putting love away

We shall not want to use again until eternity.

by Emily Dickinson

You may have some time to mentally be ready for a friend’s passing when they are critically or terminally sick. That does not lessen how devastating the loss is. You could use this Poetry About Losing a Friend to help you get ready for a friend’s death.

If you know anyone who might be in need of these poems, kindly share them with them!

Poetry About Losing a Friend (For Grieving Times)