Poems
Eleven original poems for a funeral, a memorial service, an order of service, or a card. We wrote all of them. They are free for you to use.
Most pages of memorial poems reprint the same dozen public poems that everyone else has reprinted. You have probably read them already, at the last funeral you went to. We write for a living, so instead of copying we wrote you a set of our own.
They are grouped by relationship below. None of them rhyme on a schedule, none of them mention angels, and none of them tell you that grief gets easier. They are meant to be said out loud by an ordinary person with a shaking piece of paper.
One thing to know before you read. Each poem hangs on a specific object or habit: a mixing bowl, a jar of screws, a laugh you could hear from the driveway. Those details are ours, and you should feel free to replace them with yours. A poem is stronger with the actual chair in it.
These are free to use. Read one at a service, print one in the program, write one inside a card, put one on a memorial page. No permission, no fee, no credit required, though we always like to hear where a poem ended up. The only thing we ask is that you do not sell them as your own writing.
She kept the porch light on
long after we all had keys.
That was the whole of it.
She wanted us able to arrive.
She read the weather in her knees
and trouble in a voice on the phone,
and she never once said she had told us so
in a way that meant it.
We are still arriving. Hungry,
later than we said,
at hours she would have called ridiculous.
The light she left is doing its work.
Nobody taught her to be first awake.
She simply was. The kettle, the radio low,
the day already half sorted
before the rest of us admitted to it.
She fixed things with whatever was in the drawer.
She fed whoever turned up.
When we were frightened she got practical,
which is a kind of tenderness
that does not announce itself.
There is a chair by the window that knows her shape.
We are learning to sit in the quiet
she used to fill without trying.
He was not a talker.
He did the driving.
The airport at four in the morning.
The town two states over with the bad directions.
The game he could have watched at home.
Whatever we had going,
he was out front with the engine running.
That was how he said the other thing.
Now the road says it for him.
Every turn I take by feel
is one he taught me without saying so.
He had rules that were not really rules.
Check the oil. Hold the door.
Never let anybody leave hungry.
Never make a promise you would have to explain.
He was wrong about music
and right about nearly everything else,
and he would drop a whole argument
if winning it was going to cost him the evening.
I catch myself in his sentences.
I catch myself in his hands.
There are worse ways to be haunted
than by a man with good rules.
We were not a great romance.
We were a kettle, twice a day,
and whose turn it was,
and forty years of small negotiations
settled, in the end, in both our favor.
I still make the second cup.
I have stopped apologizing for that.
Love turned out not to be the big word.
It was knowing which side of the bed,
which silence,
and being the one who knew.
Forty years of the same jokes
and I never once had to explain one.
That is the part nobody warns you about.
The shorthand goes,
and you are left translating yourself
to a room full of people who mean well.
Still. I had somebody
who knew the whole story and stayed.
Most people are only guessing at each other.
We were not.
She had opinions about socks
and a laugh you could hear from the driveway
and a hundred questions a day,
most of them good ones.
We do not have an answer to the big one.
We have the driveway, and the laugh in it,
and a house that learned her name
and is not going to unlearn it.
Say it out loud when you think of her.
She liked being talked about.
Nobody else remembers the upstairs of that house,
or the rules of the game we invented,
or why the word Tuesday was funny for a year.
You were my witness.
We fought the way people fight
over a chore they share,
and we were on the same side the entire time
without ever once discussing it.
I am the only one holding the story now.
I tell it badly, and often.
Everybody here is going to learn it.
Her house ran on its own time.
Food at odd hours. Television too loud.
Permission for things our parents had refused,
granted at the door, without discussion.
She thought we were remarkable
on the plain evidence of our being there.
Nobody has believed in me
on such little proof since.
I have her mixing bowl.
It still knows what to do.
I am the one who needs practice.
He told the same four stories,
and we let him, because the fourth one
was the one where he met her.
He had a shed, a system,
and a low opinion of hurrying.
He would show you how a thing worked
whether or not you had asked.
There is a jar of screws in my garage
I will never sort and never throw out.
Some inheritances are like that.
You do not get a row at the front.
There is no word for what you were.
Friend is too small a coat for it,
so I will use the long version:
the one I called first,
the one who came when it was inconvenient,
the one who knew the unflattering parts
and never once used them.
Thirty years. No paperwork.
Just turning up, over and over,
until it added up to a life
held in common.
Choosing
Read it out loud before you decide. A poem can look right on a screen and fight your mouth the moment you speak it. If you stumble twice in the same place, that is the poem telling you something, not you failing.
Match the person, not the occasion. Funerals pull everybody toward a grand register that most people never used in life. If she was funny and plain spoken, choose the plain one. If he would have hated being called a saint, do not read him a poem that calls him one. The room will recognize the mismatch even if nobody names it.
Ten or twelve lines is usually enough at a service. There are other readings, people are standing, and the shortest thing said is often the thing quoted in the parking lot afterwards. A longer poem is better suited to a program, where people can sit with it.
Change the words. Swap the pronouns. Put in what she actually called you. Take out the mixing bowl and put in the enamel jug with the chip in it. These poems are a shape to pour your own detail into, and nobody will ever know that a line was moved.
If reading it yourself feels impossible, ask somebody else to read it and stand beside them while they do. That is not a lesser version. It is quite a moving thing to watch.
Writing
There is one rule and everything else follows from it. If a line could be about somebody else's mother, cut it. Not softened, cut. The lines that make people stop are always the ones that could only ever be about one person.
So do not begin by writing. Begin by listing. Sit down and write twenty things with no sentences around them: the coat, the route she drove, the thing he said when the phone rang, what was on the windowsill, the argument you always had, the way he answered the door. Half of it will be useless. Three or four items will make your chest go tight, and those are the poem.
Then arrange, do not decorate. Put the plainest true thing first. Resist the pull toward the funeral voice, the one that nobody has ever used in a kitchen. Ordinary words carry more weight in a room full of people who are barely holding on.
Do not chase a rhyme. A rhyme that arrives on its own is a gift; a rhyme you go looking for will cost you the truth of the line every time, and everybody can hear the moment a poem starts serving its own ending instead of the person it is about.
Finish small. The temptation is to end large, with something about love or time or the whole of a life. It almost never lands. End on an object, a habit, a sentence they used to say. Look at the poems above: a jar of screws, a light left on, a girl who liked being talked about. Small things hold.
Then read it aloud, and cut a quarter of it. That is the part everybody skips and it is where most of the improvement is.
Every poem on this page was written by Known Truly. It is what we do the rest of the time as well: a family tells us who somebody was, and we write an original piece from their memories, set beside a photograph and framed for the wall. If you would rather have something nobody else has ever read, that is what we make.
And if you want to use one of these but need a word changed to fit, a name, a pronoun, a detail that is wrong for your family, write to [email protected] and we will help you fix it. There is no charge for that, and there never will be.