tragedy poems Archives - Best Poetry Online

Tragedy | Gemelene Magalona

I left for you,

the hollow silhouette
of a faithful shadow
lurking in the wistful wilderness

where echoes of despair
wail in the crippling thickness
of a drowning silence engulfed
by yesterday’s haunting melodies

I left for you,

the plague of a lie
draped with the dulcet tones
from a vow-stricken promises
of eternity’s black veil of fallen petals

I burn the effigy
of poison laden dreams
and buried it in the
April graveyards of my crimson veins.

I left for you,

the jagged reflections
of my pristine memoirs,
as I rip my heart tonight
in tragedy of us.

Swimming in Antarctica | Ciarán Parkes

October 25, 2023 / Best Poetry / antarctica poems, cold poems, contemporary poetry, swimming poems, tragedy poems / 2 Comments

How she accepts it. How she enters willingly
into the cold. How her skin, almost immediately,
becomes cold as the water is, her body’s heat

pushed deep down under, to protect
her internal organs, that flush with blood, that float
like fish in some warm Mesozoic ocean

as her heartbeat thunders round them, as they move,
just for now, companionable, together.
She sees penguins on the dipping, rising shore

and people bundled up who look like penguins,
black against the snow. Her back up team
lean from their inflatables as she threshes water

up like bed sheets, speeding, swimming faster
than she ever swam before, to generate
more warmth, to stay alive, then something

shifting inside her as she starts to swim
straight out to sea, moving so fast they
can do nothing now but watch her slip away.

(First published in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily)

A Brighter Burn | Jenny Middleton

September 29, 2022 / Best Poetry / contemporary poetry, death poems, modern poets, tragedy poems, uncertainty poems / Leave a Comment

That night the light was slow
A faint glimmer before a brighter burn.
The singed green shade twisting
in the faint breeze mouthed
through half open windows.

I’d got up, too hot to sleep,
too tired really, for those ends
of things that tangle a mind’s
late thoughts

when a moth traced the vagueness
at the corners of the room.
Its confusion crashing at the walls,
the brightness its beacon,
and then its silhouette inside the stretched
satin shade seemed muffled
and drawn large as those paper puppets
in shadow theatres of old preconfiguring
its own demise and fizzed throes
of death as staged and restaged tragedies.

Then the stench of absence and heat
was all; a universe swallowed whole.

Shutting the light off, I stumble to the stairs
that fall into the dark, wheeling.