How about Auden
Charlie: One by Auden has always been one of my favorites. It is from "Twelve Songs" and goes like this:
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let airplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message She Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
She was our North, our South, our East and West,
Our working week and our Sunday rest,
Our noon, our midnight, our talk, our song;
We thought that love would last forever: We were wrong.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood,
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
This is the IX of Twelve Songs that I copied from Auden's Collected Shorter Poems. I changed some of the pronouns (him to her, I to we, etc.)
Anyway, sorry about your grandma and hope you like the poem. It might seem kind of highfalutin language at first but the more you read it the more you get the message that we are saying goodbye to the rock and center of our lives and that everything will stop if only momentarily to recognize that and most importantly that without her there is at least temporarily a lack of direction because the martriarch of the family provides a kind of orientation for the others. It also reads well out loud because its meter and rhyme are song like.
