Poetry About Grief and Loss - What Has Stayed With You

[Taker00]

David Hockney's death this week has had a lot of people thinking about what art means after the artist is gone, how a painting outlasts the person who made it, what it means to have a body of work that persists. It is the kind of loss that prompts reading, or returning to things you had not thought about in a while.

This is a thread for poetry about grief, loss or mortality that has genuinely stayed with you. Not necessarily the most famous or the most canonical, just the work that meant something at a particular moment or that you return to. Could be about the loss of a person, a time, a place, a version of yourself.

Share whatever feels right. No need to explain unless you want to.

[Oscar_38]

Mary Oliver's When Death Comes. Not for the death itself but for the list of what you want to have done with your life before it arrives. I have read it at least once a year for twenty years

[Gareth_11]

Douglas Dunn's Elegies for his wife Lesley. The whole collection, not just the famous sections. The ordinary domestic details of grief, the way ordinary objects carry impossible weight. The most honest poetry about loss I have ever read