In love longing
I listen to the monk's bell.
I will never forget you
even for an interval
Short as those between the bell notes.
~ Izumi Shikibu

Give sorrow words;
the grief that does not speak
Whispers the o'er-fraught heart
and bids it break.
~ William Shakespeare, in Macbeth, Act IV, Scene III

They are all gone into the world of light,
And I alone sit lingering here;
Their very memory is fair and bright,
And my sad thoughts doth clear.
~ Henry Vaughan, from Silex Scintillans 'They are all gone'

Come to me in my dreams, and then
By day I shall be well again!
For then the night will more than pay
The hopeless longing of the day.
~ Matthew Arnold

Now fades the last long streak of snow,
Now burgeons every maze of quick
About the flowering squares, and thick
By ashen roots the violets blow.
~ Alfred, Lord Tennyson

When you are sorrowful
look into your heart
and you shall see that
you are weeping
for that which has been
your delight
~ Kahlil Gibran

For winter's rains and ruins are over,
And all the season of snows and sins;
The days dividing lover and lover,
The light that loses, the night that wins;
And time remembered is grief forgotten,
And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,
And in green underwood and cover
Blossom by blossom the spring begins.
~ Algernon Charles Swinburne

I have only slipped away into the next room
I am I and you are you. Whatever we were to each other
that we still are. Call me by my old familiar name.
Speak to me in the easy way which you always used.
Play, smile, think of me. All is well.
~ Henry Scott Holland (shortened from What is Death?)

In one of the stars, I shall be living.
In one of them, I shall be laughing.
And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing when you look at the sky at night.
~ The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Some more short bereavement and sympathy poems.

Memory Can Tell Us Only What We Were

Memory can tell us only what we were,
In company with those we loved,
It cannot help us find out what each of us,
Alone, must now become.
Yet, no person is really alone,
Those who live no more still echo
Within our thoughts and words,
And what they did has become
Woven into what we are.

~Richard Fife


Turn Again to Life

If I should die and leave you here a while,
be not like others sore undone,
who keep long vigil by the silent dust.
For my sake turn again to life and smile,
nerving thy heart and trembling hand
to do something to comfort other hearts than thine.
Complete these dear unfinished tasks of mine
and I perchance may therein comfort you.

~ Mary Lee Hall