These are some great, heartfelt poems about death and grief.
* from the Scraps of Faith collection of poems:
Herr Generalfeldmarschall Rommel Takes Cyanide
What’s True [near-death of 3-year-old son riding tricycle]
Poet on Deathbed Recounts Close Shaves
* from A Poetry-Lover’s Guide to the World-Wide Web:
“The bustle in a house” (Emily Dickinson)
“Patterns” (Amy Lowell)
If I should learn, in some quite casual way (Edna Millay)
Spring (Edna Millay) Edna Millay photo — >
Lament (Edna Millay)
Dirge without Music (Edna Millay)
And you as well must die, belovèd dust (Edna Millay)
“Funeral Blues” (W. H. Auden)
“And Death Shall Have No Dominion” (Dylan Thomas)
“A Refusal to Mourn the Death of a Child, by Fire, in London” (Dylan Thomas)
“Rothko and Cassandra” (Bill Wolf) [“… meant more to him than the sea and the sky, the sun and the moon.”]
“Selah” (Rebecca Robinson) [“You cannot be gone. / You are so damn young.”]
“Elegy for Jane” (Theodore Roethke) [“I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;…”]
“Helen” (C.K. Williams)
“Planting a Sequoia” (Dana Gioia)