[David Landrum]

I have not experienced such loss, but this poem always struck me as particularly tender. It was written by Izumi Shikibu in c. 1023 when her nine year-old daughter died:

Why did you vanish
into empty sky?
Even the fragile snow,
when it falls,
falls into the world.

Translation by Jane Hirshfield.

dwl

[David Landrum]

And this one, by Ted Kooser, still makes cry:

A Child's Grave Marker

A small block of granite
engraved with her name and the dates
just wasn't quite pretty enough
for this lost little girl
or her parents, who added a lamb
cast in plaster of paris,
using the same kind of cake mold
my grandmother had--iron,
heavy and black as a skillet.
The lamb came out coconut-white,
and seventy years have proven it
soft in the rain. On this hill,
overlooking a river in Iowa,
it melts in its own sweet time.

[Janet Kenny]

Here is one by Leo Haber from Blood to Remember, an anthology of poems about the Holocaust.

Sanctification *

Let us mourn the murder of children together,
You and I, in the graceful form of the rhymed
Sonnet, dimensions of meaning, rigidly timed
Ritual of comfort at the brutal end of one’s tether.
Young Alena Synkova tethered to L
410 spoke for all the children in free
Verse and fourteen short lines. Listen! See
the child in her innocent wisdom outwitting hell.

“Listen! / The boat whistle has sounded now / And we
Must sail / Out toward an unknown port / We’ll sail a long
Long Way / And dreams will turn to truth . . . / Just look up

To heaven / And think about the violets.” See
The child in the chamber of gas, listen to her song,
Mourn with the Kaddish; bless with the Kiddush cup.
____________


*The quotations in this poem are from a fourteen-line poem, “To Olga,” by L410, the number of one of the children’s homes in the Terezín concentration camp, circa 1943–44.

(Blood to remember: American poets on the Holocaust / edited by
Charles Adés Fishman)

[Maryann Corbett]

John Crowe Ransom, "Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter"

There was such speed in her little body,
And such lightness in her footfall,
It is no wonder her brown study
Astonishes us all.

Her wars were bruited in our high window.
We looked among orchard trees and beyond
Where she took arms against her shadow,
Or harried unto the pond

The lazy geese, like a snow cloud
Dripping their snow on the green grass,
Tricking and stopping, sleepy and proud,
Who cried in goose, Alas,

For the tireless heart within the little
Lady with rod that made them rise
From their noon apple-dreams and scuttle
Goose-fashion under the skies!

But now go the bells, and we are ready,
In one house we are sternly stopped
To say we are vexed at her brown study,
Lying so primly propped.

[Golias]

Maryann,

Sincere thanks for posting "Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter." Hardly a week goes by without my reciting this one to myself or to whomever is by. It is a model and a scource of inspiration.

Wiley

[Gregory Dowling]

Another poem about a child victim of the Holocaust is Hecht's sestina "The Book of Yolek". Here's a link to an anthology that contains it; if you just insert a few words from the opening line ("The dowsed coals fume...") in the Find box you'll be taken to it. There's also a fascinating commentary by Hecht about how he came to write it.

[Janice D. Soderling]

Thank you, John, for this thread which I only now noticed. There were many poems I had not seen before which touched me to the core. Words do have power. Nearly all the moving and eloquent poems with which I am familiar have been offered already but I would like to add this one, also by Dana Gioia, for his dead son.

Prayer

Echo of the clocktower, footstep
in the alleyway, sweep
of the wind sifting the leaves

Jeweller of the spiderweb, connoisseur
of autumn's opulence, blade of lightning
harvesting the sky.

Keeper of the small gate, choreographer
of entrances and exits, midnight
whisper travelling the wires

Seducer, healer, deity or thief,
I will see you soon enough—
in the shadow of the rainfall,

in the brief violet darkening a sunset—
but until then I pray watch over him
as a mountain guards its covert ore

and the harsh falcon its flightless young.

[Jones Pat]

Thank you all for this thread. Having recently lost a son, not a child, but one who remained a child in many ways, I have loved reading these poems, wept but also received comfort from them all..two in particular, Mid-term Break by Heaney because it speaks so honestly to sibling loss...and the other, the Kooser that David posted...it is just so midwestern, like me, so like something I might do.

Thanks again, all.

Pat

[ChrisGeorge]

Dylan Thomas's poem, "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London," posted above is appropriate at this time, I think, given the execrable events in Britain at this moment.

Chris

[David Anthony]

Dunno, Chris.

The rioters are nearly all teenagers.

Nearly all Afro-Caribbean too, though you won't see that in the news reports.

Best regards,

David