Poems on the topic: death

Poems on the topic “death” on Poets.by.

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Dave Bonta

Frost Soldiers

Frost soldiers receive dark company: that dead lady, Money. They all called home and found me.

Dave Bonta

old gray body bound for no grave for no grave has issued us visas and i am a law- abiding citizen which is to say i suppose the law is my abode so this carcass of mine has standing and grows more and more abstract taxed and insured vaccinated and boosted password-protected two-factor authenticated

Dave Bonta

Summer Postmortem

summer is dead i found her green leaf body at the foot of an oak in the first snow blanketing the valley the smell of diesel 100 feet downridge there’s a fallen nest woven from strips of wild gravevine bark the trees are becoming more and more vacant though they shriek and moan in the wind i remember what jesus said about new wine

Dave Bonta

Hallow’s Eve

in the real world hills are for cemeteries from a distance the gravestones might as well be stumps or teeth waiting for the other jaw to descend a woman lets her rottweiler run a gravedigger operates a small backhoe i browse the headstones as if they were spines of books GIVEN says one and i feel guilty for killing time try not to look over at the mountain

Dave Bonta

Wild Apples

giving my apple core a toss watching it arc and land in a forest clearing i think of you Dad saying where should i plant an apple tree today a habit from boyhood summers at your uncle’s orchard continuing into your college days on a motor scooter with Mom exploring every mountain and forest in Pennsylvania the fall and only the fall was for apples culminating in your favorite the stayman winesap

Dave Bonta

Leaves on Grass

we could’ve been albatrosses drifting on the wind for years able to dip into our shadows which would’ve tasted like salt we could’ve been playing cards given darkness a respectable home instead having loved the sun and digested light for a living we meet our shadows only at death lie atop them leaching out our vital bitters

Dave Bonta

Insomnia

dead again the skull fills with soil a small busy mammal briefly inhabits it leaves an acorn behind in the brain case which awakens and can’t go back feelers root for the teeming light mycelia for neurons no eye but an owl

Dave Bonta

Saved by Death

forest downpour heard first in the treetops i picture a cinematic rain of arrows or maybe small frogs like the two in the road earlier one still moving the other just bones and wasps i took picture after picture on my phone which now rests like a joey in a dry pocket soon the gravel road is two torrents and i am a turtle hunched under poncho and umbrella

Dave Bonta

How it started

spiderlings before we were dust how we crawled while you watched the sunset i watched darkness climb the trees though the sky never really gets dark any more i began growing a hump as a form of protest and now it looms invisibly over my every croak and cry i call it O for Oblivion as well as the Obvious what i thought were spiderlings was the detritus of their eggs in the right light anything can look promising

Dave Bonta

Residual

Thirty years after the sudden death of someone I didn’t know terribly well, what remains? Not his name. Not quite his face, but something of his posture and physique. A strong impression of good-natured and thoughtful conviviality, based on possibly no more than half a dozen conversations, always on the periphery of punk shows. The shock and sadness of his death from a brain tumor. Someone who, on rare occasions when he pops into my head, still makes me smile, and shapes my memory of that whole period in my life. Good times. A good dude. Wish I remembered his name. fledgling cuckoo flopping across the road adoptive parents nowhere to be found poor little rain-crow didn’t mean to be a parasite

Dave Bonta

Ephemeroptera

Driving home along the river, I have to turn on the windshield wipers every mile or two because of all the mayflies, the off-white inkblots of their anonymous deaths. Imagine living one’s life in a state of arrested development, and only on your last day undergoing not one, but two radical transformations, one after the other: growing wings, breathing air, and mating just once, having gained reproductive parts in exchange for the loss of a mouth. spring again scheduling my first Covid shot

Dave Bonta

Losing Maizy

Maizy the terrier had always traveled in circles — around the park, around the block, around the garden — but toward the end her circles tightened drastically till they occupied no more than a corner of the kitchen. She no longer recognized her own front door and became utterly lost. Except, it seems, on the lap of her life-long companion, my partner Rachel. Her fits become more frequent and prolonged, each time leaving her a bit more impaired. Finally Rachel made the agonizing decision to have her euthanized. She found a vet who made house calls, and when the time came, held Maizy as if she were an infant while the drugs kicked in. Rachel said she felt her relax all over, and then, a few seconds later, simply stop breathing.

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