16 poems about Sadness

I know what the caged bird feels, alas!
When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;
When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,
And the river flows like a stream of glass;
When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,
And the faint perfume from its chalice steals—
I know what the caged bird feels!

I know why the caged bird beats his wing
Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;
For he must fly back to his perch and cling
When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;
And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars
And they pulse again with a keener sting—
I know why he beats his wing!

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,—
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings—
I know why the caged bird sings!

Wise up, Sorrow. Calm down.
You always lay claim to twilight. Well, here it is, brother,
It descends. Obscurity settles over the town,
bringing peace to one, worry to another.
The restless crowd, whipped on by pleasure—
our dogged torturer—carry their hearts’ raw
remorse with them as they serve their vapid leisure,
while you, my Sorrow, drop by here, take my hand, and draw
me apart from them. We watch the dying years
in faded gowns lean out from heaven’s balconies, as Regret rears,
smiling, out of the deep dark where the dead ones march.
Dragging its long train—now a shroud—from its early light
in the East, the sun goes to sleep under an arch.
Listen, Sorrow, beloved, to the soft approach of Night.
Anywhere Out Of The World
This life is a hospital where every patient is possessed with the
desire to change beds; one man would like to suffer in front of
the stove, and another believes that he would recover his health
beside the window.
It always seems to me that I should feel well in the place where I
am not, and this question of removal is one which I discuss
incessantly with my soul.
'Tell me, my soul, poor chilled soul, what do you think of going to
live in Lisbon? It must be warm there, and there you would
invigorate yourself like a lizard. This city is on the sea-shore; they
say that it is built of marble and that the people there have such
a hatred of vegetation that they uproot all the trees. There you
have a landscape that corresponds to your taste! a landscape
made of light and mineral, and liquid to reflect them!'
My soul does not reply.
'Since you are so fond of stillness, coupled with the show of
movement, would you like to settle in Holland,
that beatifying country? Perhaps you would find some diversion
in that land whose image you have so often admired
in the art galleries. What do you think of Rotterdam, you who
love forests of masts, and ships moored at the foot of
houses?'
My soul remains silent.
'Perhaps Batavia attracts you more? There we should find,
amongst other things, the spirit of Europe married to tropical
beauty.'
Not a word. Could my soul be dead?
'Is it then that you have reached such a degree of lethargy that
you acquiesce in your sickness? If so, let us flee to lands that are
analogues of death. I see how it is, poor soul! We shall pack our
trunks for Tornio. Let us go farther still to the extreme end of the
Baltic; or farther still from life, if that is possible; let us settle at
the Pole. There the sun only grazes the earth obliquely, and the
slow alternation of light and darkness suppresses variety and
increases monotony, that half-nothingness. There we shall be
able to take long baths of darkness, while for our amusement the
aurora borealis shall send us its rose-coloured

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example: “The night is starry,
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.”

The night wind turns in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

On nights like this I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again beneath the endless sky.

She loved me sometimes, and I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great, still eyes?

Tonight

DEDICATION
The high crags decline before this woe,
The great river does not flow ahead,
But they’re strong – the locks of a jail, stone,
And behind them – the cells, dark and low,
And the deadly pine is spread.
For some one, somewhere, a fresh wind blows,
For some one, somewhere, wakes up a dawn –
We don’t know, we’re the same here always,
We just hear the key’s squalls, morose,
And the sentry’s heavy step alone;
Got up early, as for Mass by Easter,
Walked the empty capital along
To create the half-dead peoples’ throng.
The sun downed, the Neva got mister,
But our hope sang afar its song.
There’s a sentence… In a trice tears flow…
Now separated, cut from us,
As if they’d pulled out her heart and thrown
Or pushed down her on a street stone –
But she goes… Reels… Alone at once.
Where are now friends unwilling those,
Those friends of my two years, brute?
What they see in the Siberian snows,
In a circle of the moon, exposed?
To them I send my farewell salute.
PROLOGUE
In this time, just a dead could half-manage
A weak smile – with the peaceful state glad.
And, like some heavy, needless appendage,
Mid its prisons swung gray Leningrad.
And, when mad from the tortures’ succession,
Marched the army of those, who’d been doomed,
Sang the engines the last separation
With their whistles through smoking gloom,
And the deathly stars hanged our heads over
And our Russia writhed under the boots –
With the blood of the guiltless full-covered –
And the wheels on Black Maries’ black routes.
1
You were taken away at dawn’s mildness.
I convoyed you, as my dead-born child,
Children cried in the room’s half-grey darkness,
And the lamp by the icon lost light.
On your lips dwells the icon kiss’s cold
On your brow – the cold sweet … Don’t forget!
Like a wife of the rebel of old
On the Red Square, I’ll wail without end.
2
The quiet Don bears quiet flood,
The crescent enters in a hut.
He enters with a cap on head,
He sees a woman like a shade.
This woman’s absolutely ill,
This woman’s absolutely single.
Her man is dead, son – in a jail,
Oh, pray for me – a poor female!
3
No, ‘tis not I, ‘tis someone’s in a suffer –
I was ne’er able to endure such pain.
Let all, that was, be with a black cloth muffled,
And let the lanterns be got out ... and reign
just Night.
4
You should have seen, girl with some mocking manner,
Of all your friends the most beloved pet,
The whole Tsar Village’s a sinner, gayest ever –
What should be later to your years sent.
How, with a parcel, by The Crosses, here,
You stand in line with the ‘Three Hundredth’ brand
And, with your hot from bitterness a tear,
Burn through the ice of the New Year, dread.
The prison’s poplar’s bowing with its brow,
No sound’s heard – But how many, there,
The guiltless ones are loosing their lives now…

5
I’ve cried for seventeen long months,
I’ve called you for your home,
I fell at hangmen’ feet – not once,
My womb and hell you’re from.
All has been mixed up for all times,
And now I can’t define
Who is a beast or man, at last,
And when they’ll kill my son.
There’re left just flowers under dust,
The censer’s squall, the traces, cast
Into the empty mar…
And looks strait into my red eyes
And threads with death, that’s coming fast,
The immense blazing star.
6
The light weeks fly faster here,
What has happened I don’t know,
How, into your prison, stone,
Did white nights look, my son, dear?
How do they stare at you, else,
With their hot eye of a falcon,
Speak of the high cross, you hang on,
Of the slow coming death?
7
THE SENTENCE
The word, like a heavy stone,
Fell on my still living breast.
I was ready. I didn’t moan.
I will try to do my best.
I have much to do my own:
To forget this endless pain,
Force this soul to be stone,
Force this flesh to live again.
Just if not … The rustle of summer
Feasts behind my window sell.
Long before I’ve seen in slumber
This clear day and empty cell.
8
TO DEATH
You’ll come in any case – why not right now, therefore?
I wait for you – my strain is highest.
I have doused the light and left opened the door
For you, so simple and so wondrous.
Please, just take any sight, which you prefer to have:
Thrust in – in the gun shells’ disguises,
Or crawl in with a knife, as an experienced knave,
Or poison me with smoking typhus,
Or quote the fairy tale, grown in the mind of yours
And known to each man to sickness,
In which I’d see, at last, the blue of the hats’ tops,
And the house-manager, ‘still fearless’.
It’s all the same to me. The cold Yenisei lies
In the dense mist, the Northern Star – in brightness,
And a blue shine of the beloved eyes
Is covered by the last fear-darkness.
9
Already madness, with its wing,
Covers a half of my heart, restless,
Gives me the flaming wine to drink
And draws into the vale of blackness.
I understand that just to it
My victory has to be given,
Hearing the ravings of my fit,
Now fitting to the stranger’s living.
And nothing of my own past
It’ll let me take with self from here
(No matter in what pleas I thrust
Or how often they appear):
Not awful eyes of my dear son –
The endless suffering and patience –
Not that black day when thunder gunned,
Not that jail’s hour of visitation,
Not that sweet coolness of his hands,
Not that lime’s shade in agitation,
Not that light sound from distant lands –
Words of the final consolations.
10
CRUCIFIXION
Don’t weep for me, Mother,
seeing me in a grave.
I
The angels’ choir sang fame for the great hour,
And skies were melted in the fire’s rave.
He said to God, “Why did you left me, Father?”
And to his Mother, “Don’t weep o’er my grave…”
II
Magdalena writhed and sobbed in torments,
The best pupil turned into a stone,
But none dared – even for a moment –
To sight Mother, silent and alone.
EPILOGUE
I
I’ve known how, at once, shrink back the faces,
How fear peeps up from under the eyelids,
How suffering creates the scriptural pages
On the pale cheeks its cruel reigning midst,
How the shining raven or fair ringlet
At once is covered by the silver dust,
And a smile slackens on the lips, obedient,
And deathly fear in the dry snicker rustles.
And not just for myself I pray to Lord,
But for them all, who stood in that line, hardest,
In a summer heat and in a winter cold,
Under the wall, so red and so sightless.
II
Again a memorial hour is near,
I can now see you and feel you and hear:
And her, who’d been led to the air in a fit,
And her – who no more touches earth with her feet.
And her – having tossed with her beautiful head –
She says, “I come here as to my homestead.”
I wish all of them with their names to be called;
But how can I do that? I have not the roll.
The wide common cover I’ve wov’n for their lot –
>From many a word, that from them I have caught.
Those words I’ll remember as long as I live,
I’d not forget them in a new awe or grief.
And if will be stopped my long-suffering mouth –
Through which always shout our people’s a mass –
Let them pray for me, like for them I had prayed,
Before my remembrance day, quiet and sad.
And if once, whenever in my native land,
They’d think of the raising up my monument,
I give my permission for such good a feast,
But with one condition – they have to place it
Not near the sea, where I once have been born –
All my warm connections with it had been torn,
Not in the tsar’s garden near that tree-stump, blessed,
Where I am looked for by the doleful shade,
But here, where three hundred long hours I stood for
And where was not opened for me the hard door.
Since e’en in the blessed death, I shouldn’t forget
The deafening roar of Black Maries’ black band,
I shouldn’t forget how flapped that hateful door,
And wailed the old woman, like beast, it before.
And let from the bronze and unmoving eyelids,
Like some melting snow flow down the tears,
And let a jail dove coo in somewhat afar
And let the mute ships sail along the Neva.

(For Rossana Sironi)

Dear one, you should not have
ripped out your image,
taken from us, from the world,
a portion of beauty.
What can we do,
we enemies of death,
bent to your feet of rose,
your breast of violet?
Not a word, not a scrap
of your last day, a No
to earth’s things, a No
to our dull human record.
The sad moon in summer,
the dragging anchor, took
your dreams, hills, trees,
light, waters, darkness,
not dim thoughts but truths,
severed from the mind
that suddenly decided,
time and all future evil.
Now you are shut
behind heavy doors,
enemy of death.

Who cries?

You have blown out beauty
with a breath, torn her,
dealt her the death-wound,
without a tear
for her insensate shadow
spreading over us.
Destroyed solitude,
and beauty, failed.
You have signalled
into the dark,
inscribed your name in air,
your No
to everything that crowds here
and beyond the wind.
I know what you were
looking for in your new dress.
I understand the unanswered question.
Neither for you nor us, a reply.
Oh, flowers and moss,
Oh, enemy of death.

Lament for the Death of Ignacio Sánchez Mejías

Up the bleachers goes Ignacio
with death on his shoulders.
He looks for dawn
and it isn’t dawn.
He looks for his sensible profile
and sleep confuses him.
He looks for his beautiful body
and finds his open blood.
Don’t ask me to see it!
I don’t want to feel the spurt
growing weaker by the moment,
the spurt that illumines
the seats and spills
on the hide of the thirsty crowd.
Who orders me to look!
Don’t make me see it!

His eyes didn’t close
when he saw the horns approach,
but the terrible mothers
raised their heads
and all through the cattle ranches
there was an air of secret orders
thrown to celestial bulls
by the foremen of pale mists.
There wasn’t a prince in Seville
who could compare,
no sword like his sword
nor a heart so real.
His strength was a river of lions,
his prudence a torso of marble.
An air of Andalusian Rome
gilded his head
where his smile was a rose
of salt and intelligence.
The great fighter of bulls!
The good mountaineer of the mountain!
How soft with the wheat stalk!
How hard with his spurs!
How tender with the dew!
How dazzling in the fair!
How grand with the last
banderillas of dusk!

But now he sleeps forever.
Now the grass and the moss
open with sure fingers
the flower of his skull.
And his blood comes singing:
singing through marshes and prairies,
sliding down shivering horns,
wandering soulless in fog,
stumbling on thousands of hoofs
like a long, dark, sorrowful tongue
to form a puddle of agony
by the Guadalquivir of the stars.
Oh white wall of Spain!
Oh black bull of sorrow!
Oh hard blood of Ignacio!
Oh nightingale of his veins!
No.
I don’t want to see it!
There is no chalice to hold it.
There are no swallows that drink it,
no frost of light to cool it,
no song or deluge of lilies,
no crystal to bathe it in silver.
No.
I don’t want to see it!

The night rose with its moon full above.
I began to mourn, and you laughed with contempt.
Your scorn was a god, and my poor lament
was a momentary, shackled dove.
The night fell. You became a crystal of hurt,
weeping for distances slowly deepening.
My sadness, like a crowd of sores, came creeping
across your sickened heart of dirt.
But dawn joined our bodies on the bed
and with frozen lips pried wide apart
we drank the endless blood we’d shed.
And through the shutters, I saw sunrise start.
And the coral of life, with its branches spread,
arched high above my shrouded heart.

I was the first fruits of the battle of Missionary Ridge.
When I felt the bullet enter my heart
I wished I had staid at home and gone to jail
For stealing the hogs of Curl Trenary,
Instead of running away and joining the army.
Rather a thousand times the country jail
Than to lie under this marble figure with wings,
And this granite pedestal
Bearing the words,”Pro Patria.”
What do they mean, anyway?

ALMOST the shell of a woman
after the surgeon’s knife!
And almost a year to creep back into strength,
Till the dawn of our wedding decennial
Found me my seeming self again.
We walked the forest together,
By a path of soundless moss and turf.
But I could not look in your eyes,
And you could not look in my eyes,
For such sorrow was ours
—the beginning of gray in your hair,
And I but a shell of myself.
And what did we talk of?
—sky and water,
Anything, ’most, to hide our thoughts.
And then your gift of wild roses,
Set on the table to grace our dinner.
Poor heart, how bravely you struggled
To imagine and live a remembered rapture!
Then my spirit drooped as the night came on,
And you left me alone in my room for a while,
As you did when I was a bride, poor heart.
And I looked in the mirror and something said:
“One should be all dead
when one is half-dead—”
Nor ever mock life, nor ever cheat love.”
And I did it looking there in the mirror—
Dear, have you ever understood?

Breakfast
He poured the coffee
Into the cup
He put the milk
Into the cup of coffee
He put the sugar
Into the coffee with milk
With a small spoon
He churned
He drank the coffee
And he put down the cup
Without any word to me
He lit
One cigarette
He made circles
With the smoke
He shook off the ash
Into the ashtray
Without any word to me
Without any look at me
He got up
He put on
His hat on his head
He put on
His raincoat
Because it was raining
And he left
Into the rain
Without any word to me
Without any look at me
And I buried
My face in my hands
And I cried.
Paris at night
Three matches one by one struck in the night
The first to see your face in its entirety
The second to see your eyes
The last to see your mouth
And the darkness all around to remind me of all these
As I hold you in my arms.

Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight,
Alone and palely loitering;
The sedge is wither'd from the lake,
And no birds sing.
Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight, So
haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel's granary is full,
And the harvest's done.
I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever dew;
And on thy cheek a fading rose Fast
withereth too.
I met a lady in the meads
Full beautiful, a faery's child;
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long; For
sideways would she lean, and sing
A faery's song.
I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She look'd at me as she did love, And
made sweet moan.
She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna dew;
And sure in language strange she said,
I love thee true.
She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she gaz'd and sighed deep,
And there I shut her wild sad eyes--
So kiss'd to sleep.
And there we slumber'd on the moss, And
there I dream'd, ah woe betide,
The latest dream I ever dream'd
On the cold hill side.
I saw pale kings, and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all; Who
cry'd--"La belle Dame sans merci
Hath thee in thrall!"
I saw their starv'd lips in the gloam
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke, and found me here
On the cold hill side.
And this is why I sojourn here Alone
and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is wither'd from the lake, And
no birds sing.

This is how my sorrow became visible:
the dust that had gathered in my heart for years
finally reached my eyes.

The bitterness was now so clear
that I had to listen when my friends
told me to wash my eyes with blood.

Everything was suddenly tangled in blood—
every face, every idol, red everywhere.
Blood swept across the sun
and washed the gold from its light.

The moon erupted in blood,
its silver glow extinguished.
The sky promised a morning of blood,
and the night wept nothing but blood.

The trees hardened into crimson pillars.
Every flower filled its eyes with blood.
Every glance became an arrow,

every image it pierced, blood.
This blood—
a river crying out for martyrs—
keeps flowing in longing,
in sorrow, in rage, in love.

Let it flow.
If it is dammed up,
only hatred will remain,
dressed in the colors of death.

Don't let that happen, my friends.

Bring back all my tears instead—
let them become a flood
to wash the dust from my eyes,
to wash this blood away from my eyes forever.