Funeral & Memorial Poems: Short Readings
THE JOURNAL · GRIEF & LOSS
Short enough to read aloud, plain enough to mean it.
When you have been asked to read at a service, the hard part is rarely finding beautiful words. It is finding short ones — words you can get through, in front of people, with your voice already unsteady. These eight funeral and memorial poems are written to be read aloud: brief, plain, and slow. Each one is short enough to finish before the voice gives out, and quiet enough to leave room for the silence around it.
They are non-religious and they name no one in particular, so you can read one as it is, or pause after it to say the name yourself. Choose the single one that sounds most like the person you are remembering, and leave the rest. One spoken well is enough.
One — We Came to Say the Name
We came here to say one name
out loud, together, in one room.
To hold it for a moment
the way they held so much of us.
We will carry it home in our mouths,
and we will say it again.
Two — The Empty Chair
There is a chair that will stay empty
at the table, at the holidays, in the room.
We will not pretend it isn’t.
We will set a place for the memory
and leave it set —
not to fill the space, but to honor it.
Three — What They Gave Us
Count the small things they handed us
without ever calling them gifts —
a way of saying a word,
a patience, a recipe, a laugh.
We did not write them down at the time.
We are writing them down now.
Four — For the Ones Left in the Room
Look around at who is here.
These are the people who knew them too.
For a little while we are a circle
standing where they stood.
Lean on the shoulder beside you.
It is leaning back.
Five — A Plain Goodbye
We do not have fine words for this.
We have the plain ones:
thank you. We loved you.
We are sorry it is goodbye.
That is the whole of it,
and it is true.
Six — Where We Will Find Them
Not in the sky, we won’t pretend.
In the turn of a phrase we kept.
In the dish made the way they made it.
In the pause before a hard decision
where we ask what they would have said.
That is where they stayed.
Seven — A Short Blessing for the Day
May the day hold us gently.
May the tears come when they come
and not be hurried off.
May we be soft with one another now,
the way they were soft with us.
May the quiet, when it falls, be kind.
Eight — We Will Take It From Here
Rest now. You did your part.
We will take the next while from here —
the slow days, the empty chair,
the saying of your name.
You can set it all down.
We have it.
If you are choosing a reading, pick the one that sounds most like the person, not the one that sounds most like a poem. Read it slowly. It is all right to stop, to breathe, to begin a line again. The people listening are not waiting for you to perform — they are sitting in the same quiet, and a small steady voice carries further in that room than a perfect one.
Grief is heavier than any reading can carry, and the days after a service are their own long thing. If it is sitting on you in a way that feels hard to hold alone, it is okay to reach for a real person, too — someone you trust, or someone whose work it is to help with loss. A poem can keep you company at the service; the rest is more than a page should be asked to carry.
FREE, TO KEEP
A few of these to keep.
If you would like a few of these to keep, the free reading is here — short poems and a five-minute audio reading in one calm voice, for the quiet days after. And if you are looking for more to read in the long after a loss, Stillness Is the Ritual holds a fuller set, written in the same plain register.
A note from the Library: these readings are plain on purpose. They are meant to be said aloud, slowly, with room left for the silence after. — Zen Roots, published by Ledgerstone Press.