Potential Titles: Ash (both tree and fire residue)

[somethingdarker]

Some of these are ambiguous about what kind of 'ash' they're about. Might be the tree, might be the stuff left after a fire. More the latter than the former, but... Ambiguous.

Only ashes to ornament the air - Rasha Abdulhadi "little bat"

Art bloomed from the ash of loss - Rasha Abdulhadi "Pocketful of Warding Stones"

Masticate the ash of witness - Aria Aber "Can You Describe Your Years in Prison"

From the ashes of red spider lilies - Jeff William Acosta "Call Out My Name"

An ashen cup of neutral air - Harold Acton "Cold Joints"

The marriage of ash and salt below - Daisy Aldan "Everywhere in Constancy, He Is Intoning, Look! Look!"

I can't help but reason with your ash - Ahmad Almallah "Some Verse for the Depressed Rebel"

From hostile ashes kindly blent - Duncan Anderson "The Death of Wolfe"

In ashes our hearth fire is hidden - "Anthology of Jugoslav Poetry CXXVII: Mother at the Tomb of Her Son" transl. by J.W. Wiles

To stain the ashy sky - Atticus "Love Her Wild"

cataloguing enough ash in my voice - Wale Ayinla "To Disappear into a Song Wide Enough to Drown"

The ashes of heroes enshrouded in glory - J.O.B. "Greece" [Mirror of Literature issue 385 Aug. 1829]

From the ashes of its first life - Rebecca Baggett "Chestnut"

Hydrogen cooling in columns of ash - Mary Jo Bang "And No Signs Will Mark the Midpoint's Passing"

Rats in the ashes - Mary Jo Bang "G Is Going"

The deaths past and present in ashes - Mary Jo Bang "Once Upon a Time"

A tree trunk formed from a handful of ashes - Mary Jo Bang "Still as in a Still After Still"

Survey the stone where Alexander's ashes lay - Anna Laetitia Barbauld "Eighteen Hundred and Eleven"

Grow from cinder and stinking ash - Margo Berdeshevsky "Somewhere Everywhere"

A handful of intangible ash - Elizabeth Bishop "The Armadillo"

Like ashes concealing fire - Terry Blackhawk "Medea--Garland of Fire"

The weight of ashes from burned-out camps - Kimberly Blaeser "Apprentice to Justice"

Lighter than frost or ashes - Louise Bogan "Words for Departure"

Through gray streets beneath an ashen sky - Bruce Boston "Gray People"

Ash woven into a distant sky - Julia Bouwsma "Dear ghosts, you say all our bones are made of paper"

Etched with rudiments of spark and ash - Catherine Bowman "Pears"

Very bitter with the ashes - Stopford A. Brooke "Song (From 'Six Days')"

From the ashes of the next-best-thing - Molly McCully Brown and Susannah Nevison "Operating Room"

Ash tight fingers, the steel laws of fate - Paul Cameron Brown "Barbary White"

A note of ash & inquiry - Mahogany L. Browne "litany"

Which kills from ashes - Elizabeth Barrett Browning "A Drama of Exile"

Will end in ashes and dust - Gerald Bullett "The Crucifixion"

Nought but ashes at the last - W. Wilfred Campbell "Unabsolved"

Snow-flakes fall through the ashen heavens - Giosue Carducci "Snowed Under" transl. by Frank Sewall

Whose domain holds Virgil's ashes - Giosue Carducci "Vincenzo Monti" transl. by Frank Sewall

In purple ash and crimson oak - Bliss Carman "The Deserted Pasture"

Hues of ash and glints of glory - Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey "Spring Song"

Long in ashes lying - Willa Cather "A Likeness: Portrait Bust of an Unknown, Capitol, Rome"

Spitting white ash smoke - Tania Chen "A Toast from Santisima Muerte"

Green heart exchanged for ash - Pacella Chukwuma- Eke "Why Is the Forest Lonely?"

Gathering each perfect ash - Lucille Clifton "the dead do dream"

Veiled in grey ashes sleeps - Arthur Colton "The Cheneaux Islands"

All the torches turned to ashes - George Cronyn "Dionysus Eleutherios: The Answer"

Ashes fall around me like pieces of the moon - P. Scott Cunningham "Florida Snow"

In azure cloak and gown of ashen grey - Olive Custance "The Autumn Day"

White ash amid funereal cypresses - H.D. "Helen"

White as ash bled of heat - H.D. "Simaetha"

Something infinite about an ash - Russell W. Davenport "Poems III"

Lost in the survival of pine and ash - Tyree Daye "To: All Poets From: Northeastern North Carolina"

Snakes the color of wood ash or fresh dark - Tyree Daye "Town Day on the Hill"

My footsteps like notes of ash - Kendra DeColo "Seville"

Ashes denote that fire was - Emily Dickinson "Book 3: Life XXX: Fire"

The ash's berry clusters not quite blushing - Chris Dombrowski "Comes to Worse"

Sweetgrass ash in the shadows - Kinsale Drake "Rebuke//Spell"

Vanishing like footprints in ash - Ansel Elkins "Native Memory"

Mouths chewing the ash of earthquakes - Martin Espada "Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100"

The ashy taste of lamentation - Andrew Feld "Abstract for a Burning City"

Our castles are mingled with ashes - George Blackstone Field "Yesterday"

Among the blaze and ash of its dying - Lysz Flo "Railroad del Mar"

Withered under blooms of ash - Jennifer Elise Foerster "Hoktvlwv's Crow"

Piles of ash like chalk outlines - Adam Ford "Arrival!"

Because the ashes didn't leave my mouth - Nikita Gill "House of Hyperion, Titan of Light"

Hovering over the ashes - Nikita Gill "The Review (or The Day That's Been Giving Me Nightmares for Months)"

The trail of ashes behind Apollo - Nikita Gill "The Sun God"

With time and ashes spread - Ellen Glasgow "The Hunter"

Singing lullabies of thunder and ash - Camille Louise Goering "Under and Down"

Ashes hide beyond your eye - Louis Golding "Lady of Babylon"

Are we not inheritors of ash - Kevin Goodan "Spot Weather Forecast"

A weather of reignited ash - Kevin Goodan "Spot Weather Forecast"

the fireworks' ashes rain down - Layla Azmi Goushey "Dream Particles"

Hickory ashes in my hair - Winnie Lewis Gravitt "Sippokni Sia"

Soft and cold as ash - Madeline Grigg "The Giantess Angrboða Drowns All the Mirrors in the House When Her Husband Loki Leaves"

Darkness burns to ashes - Nikki Grimes "On Bully Patrol"

But forbear to stir the ashes - Henry S. Hagert "The Sleep of the Dead"

Before the country was ash - Myronn Hardy "Solemnity"

Though the prophet tongue was ashes - Patrick Joseph Hartigan writing as John O'Brien "St. Patrick's Day"

Crushed into forgotten ashes - Mary Cornelia Hartshorne "Fallen Leaves"

And darkened by its ash - Terrance Hayes "Arbor for Butch"

Turned to ash in the brutal light - Terrance Hayes "Cocktails with Orpheus"

Kneel to be impressed by ashes - Seamus Heaney "Freedman"

But left us ashes and regret - Luisa Hewitt "[You lit your cigarette from mine]"

Boots in the ashes of a wood fire - Conrad Hilberry "Abandon"

Layered in delicate ash - Zoe Hitzig "I Looked on My Right Hand and Beheld"

How you became ashes - Erin Coughlin Hollowell "Maria and Oceanus"

Fall winds strip the ash tree - Hsieh Hui-Lien "Fulling Cloth for Clothes" transl. by Burton Watson

Scratching in the dead fire's ashes - Langston Hughes "The South"

The chuckle of ash sneaking into our lungs - Luther Hughes "[Like the Japanese cherry blossoms wedded to the soil's palm]"

Though it turn to ash at the end - Aldous Huxley "Waking"

For fear of being reduced to ash - Prosper C. Ìféányí "In the Future, My Mother Teaches Us How to Speak the Alpha-Numeric Language"

Bloom from the ashes of the dead - Helen Hunt Jackson "New Year's Morning"

Haloes of ash around her sleeping eyes - John James "Erosion"

Red ash of the dark solstice - Robinson Jeffers "Salmon-Fishing"

Ashes brimming with unnamed souls - Mónica Alexandra Jiménez "Theft"

Fall back upon an earth of ashes - James Weldon Johnson "The Greatest of These Is War"

Apples of ashes, golden bright - Lionel Johnson "The Dark Angel"

Tremulous beliefs, agonized hopes, and ashen flowers - Lionel Johnson "The Precept of Silence"

Ask no sad requiem o'er his ashes sung - J. Beauchamp Jones "An Hour Among the Dead" [Graham's Magazine v.XXXIV no.2, Feb. 1849]

Dreamed you a plume of ash - Saeed Jones "Postapocalyptic Heartbeat"

Art and ashes of light - Fady Joudah "Gemini"

More than starlight in ashes - Fady Joudah "Sirius"

The flame that from dark ashes springs - Sir Nizamat Jung "I: Rebirth"

Lined with the forgotten ashes of scullery maids - Sandra Kasturi "Carnaval Perpetuel"

The blue ashes snap and uproot cohosh - Janet Kauffman "In the Aftermath"

Tastes like ash going down - Cam Kelley "Playing Fetch with the Grim"

Ate leaves until your jaw ached with ash - Vandana Khanna "Goddess Out of Favor"

His doubt covers them like unforgiving ash - Vandana Khanna "Reconciliation"

Not even smoke or ashes - Faye Kicknosway "And He Did Not Know Her"

And in the ashes laid - Joyce Kilmer "Age Comes A-Wooing"

With ashen bread and wine of tears - Joyce Kilmer "The Fourth Shepherd"

Putting off thy ashy shroud - Henry King "Exequy on His Wife"

Mists of his own ashes - Galway Kinnell "The Fundamental Project of Technology"

Poking through the pestilential ash - David C. Kopaska-Merkel "An Open Letter to Our Astronauts"

Out to the ashen lands - Archibald Lampman "In October"

Its bed of ashes and sand - Dorianne Laux "Blossom"

Nations wasted to ashes - Muna Lee "Vendor of Green Coconuts"

Walked the roads in flaking ash - R.B. Lemberg "The Ash Manifesto"

The virulent water beat my flame down to ash - R.B. Lemberg "Firebird, Stormbird"

The child with hair of ash and abalone - R.B. Lemberg "Long Shadow"

Dream and ash blended into tea - R.B. Lemberg "Long Shadow"

In the avalanche of fire and ash - R.B. Lemberg "Ranra's Unbalancing"

Clouds of ash with smoke and thunder - R.B. Lemberg "Ranra's Unbalancing"

What memory shall I shape from this ash? - R.B. Lemberg "Stone Listening: Prelude"

River breaks past its banks of ash - R.B. Lemberg "Stone Listening: The New Craft"

Ash and cinder of star-fire - Denise Levertov "Two Threnodies and a Psalm"

Not these shards of ash - Philip Levine "During the War"

See in Lethe's crowded domes ashes of his hecatombs - Mrs S. Anna Lewis "The Angel's Visit"" [Graham's Magazine v.XXXV no.3, Sept. 1849]

As dust with its ashes - Li T'ai-Po "Ch'ang Kan" translated by Florence Ayscough and adapted by Amy Lowell

delivered her the ashes of my creative fire - Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li "the mezzanine"

Born in sackcloth and ashes - Annie Lighthart "Let This Day"

For those meals of ash, now you have no stone - Gary Copeland Lilley "Unmarked Grave"

Undelivered ashes of stars - Sandra Lim "Certainty"

Taking shape in the ashes of beauty, desire and pain - Sandra J. Lindow "Finding the God Particle"

Turn you to ash for a glimpse of god - Angela Liu "The Subway Is Another Place to Die"

Cyclones of ecstatic dust and ashes - Mina Loy "Lunar Baedeker"

A bright thread through the spreading ashes - Mario Luzi "Las Animas" transl. by Dana Gioia

When all our dreams are ashes - Naomi Long Madgett "Never Without Remembrance"

Amaranth ash spread across the light - J. Michael Martinez "White"

The temptation to become ash - Jamaal May "FBI Questioning During the 2009 Presidential Inauguration"

The thin, white ashes of the hearth - Theodore Maynard "Spring, 1916"

A canvas of chalk and ash - Shara McCallum "Diva"

Tactile memory real as salt, as soap, as ashes - Joanne Merriam "Mirror Points"

Over these chance dust and ashes - Edna St Vincent Millay "The Poet and His Book"

The men behind the ashes and the debris - Poupeh Missaghi "Symptoms that May Be Signs of Some Things"

Ash and smoke will play fire games - Rajiv Mohabir "Kabira"

Are but ashes in the shower - Dugald Moore "To the Clyde"

Ashes from last year's fire - jessica Care moore "After Heaven is All Goodbyes (for Tongo Eisen-Martin)"

Ashes along an amethyst skyline - jessica Care moore "She Was"

Wild beauty extracted from black ashes - jessica Care moore "Wild Beauty"

Keeps adjusting the ash heaps - Marianne Moore "The Fish"

Wandering from one body to ash - Simone Muench "Wolf Centos"

Little white boxes of ash - Laura Mullen "White Box (notes)"

Filled with stone and grief and ash - Joan Murray "Survivors--Found"

Covered in sweat and ash - Daniel Nadler [untitled]

The ash that falls from the glaciers - Pablo Neruda "America" transl. by Jack Schmitt

A loaf of ashes and resistance - Pablo Neruda "Battle of the Jarama River" translated by Richard Schaaf

Ashes dressed up like Medusa - Pablo Neruda "Cataclysm" transl. by Maria Jacketti

Armed the ash to govern - Pablo Neruda "Death in the World" transl. by Jack Schmitt

The fury of ashen destinies - Pablo Neruda "Disaction" translated by Donald D. Walsh

Stooped in the hard ash - Pablo Neruda "Hunger in the South" transl. by Jack Schmitt

Toward that springtime without ashes - Pablo Neruda "Maternity" translated by Donald D. Walsh

The fatal ashes of your mask - Pablo Neruda "Ode to the Atom" transl. by Margaret Sayers Peden

Bloody roses and goblets of ashes - Pablo Neruda "Ode with a Lament" translated by Donald D. Walsh

Buzzards covered with ashes - Pablo Neruda "Ode to Federico Garcia Lorca" translated by Donald D. Walsh

Ash of the distant burning - Pablo Neruda "Sex" transl. by Alastair Reid

Cruel ash of dead hatred - Pablo Neruda "To Envy" transl. by Alastair Reid

Holding flecks of ash rigid in her hands - Mari Ness "Gretel's Bones"

not wanting to work with ashes - Hoa Nguyen "Autumn Poem 2012"

Ashes of infinite radiance - Urayoan Noel "cinquains written during a tropical storm"

Where the ashes were poured - Margaret Noodin "Ozaagi'aan One Open to an Other"

After the forest turned to ashes - Idra Novey "Nearly"

will blow our ash into glassware - Brandon O'Brian "Population Changes"

A heap of fragrant ashes - Arthur W.E. O'Shaughnessy "A Precious Urn"

Daubed with ashes of myriad Lents - Dorothy Parker "Ballade at Thirty-Five"

Cover with ashes our love's cold crater - Dorothy Parker "Nocturne"

Seeing the ash of my life I burned - Chandler Peters-Durose "Rest Stop"

Attempts to escape from its own ashes - Phan Nhien Hao "May" (translated by Hai-Dang Phan)

Woodsmoke rising to the ashy stars - Patrick Phillips "For Paul"

The fire's wake dressed in ash - Xan Forest Phillips "Classification and Dissection"

Stir the ashes of our altars - E.J. Pratt "Ode to December, 1917"

In the ashen air - Jack Prelutsky "The Wizard"

Bathed herself in wood ash and sand - Shelley Puhak "Portrait of the Artist Watching the Election Results Come In"

Rummage in the ash in search of sound - Yousif M. Qasmiyeh "What remains of the camp when the name dies?"

Out of the ashes of coral - essa may ranapiri "Hinemoana"

Lest the living flame to ashes turn - Theodore H. Rand "The Nightingale"

Pallid ash to crimson flame - Theodore H. Rand "A Red Sunrise"

An ashen light serene - Theodore H. Rand "Song-Waves"

In a bath of oak ash lye and alum - Melissa Range "Kermes Red"

The glass itself now tinged with ash - Paisley Rekdal "Murano"

Ashes spilled - Adrienne Rich "Shooting Script 14"

A fleck of ash on the pomegranate - Lola Ridge "Firehead part I: He 3: The Light"

Emptying her craters of their silvery ash - Lola Ridge "Saint's Bridge"

And you shall have your wage of ashes - Edwin Arlington Robinson "The False Gods"

The fruit whose taste is ash - Isaac Rosenberg "The Destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonian Hordes"

Unafraid of ashes - Sonia Sanchez "9 haiku (for Freedom's Sisters)"

Goes down to eat ashes - Carl Sandburg "At the Gates of Tombs"

To cry only softly at the ashes of my mysteries - Carl Sandburg "Poems Done on a Late Night Car"

A tea-cup of ashes or so - Carl Sandburg "Pool"

Twin suns bled to ash behind their moons - Ann K. Schwader "Finale, Act Two"

Leaving us little but bitter ashes - Ann K. Schwader "If Cold Is a War"

In the burned places where light is ash - Ann K. Schwader "In the Burned Places"

Ash of slaughtered stars - Ann K. Schwader "In the Burned Places"

That burned her dreams to spiral ashes - Ann K. Schwader "Quiet in Her Mind"

In one swift Lenten smear of ash - Ann K. Schwader "Slouching Towards Entropy"

As the breath before ashes - Teresa J. Scollon "Death and the Photocopier"

The great suns burn into whitest ash - Virna Sheard "The Cry"

And mingle with forgotten ashes - James Shirley "Death's Final Conquest"

The ashen dawn of Autumn - Clark Ashton Smith "Belated Love"

And felt the loss of ashes - Richard Solomon "Last Defense"

There is fire in our father's ashes - "The Spur of Monmouth" [The Continental Monthly v.I - April, 1862 - no.IV]

To sink the ashes of their own experience - Edmund Clarence Stedman "The Protest of Faith: to Rev. --"

Where ashen gardens house the pilgrim sands - George Sterling "The Gleaner"

Ashes of the sun-deserted gold - George Sterling "Ocean Sunsets"

Crowned upon the ashen sun - George Sterling "The Testimony of the Suns"

Half its glowing temples fall to ash - George Sterling "A Visitor"

When that ashen land was young - Arthur Stringer "Sappho's Tomb"

First flicker drumming on a dead ash - Keith Taylor "Marginalia for a Natural History"

And fling the ashes to the wind - "There's Someone I Think Of" transl. by Burton Watson

Wrapped in their ashen light - Sarah Titus "The Angels Sip Manhattans Wearing the Faces of Our Dead"

Ash aching to be reminded - TC Tolbert "This Is What You Are"

In the ashes I stand on - Edwin Torres "The Circle at One End"

Chill ignoble ashes for despair to strew - Iris Tree "[Blow upon blow they bruise the daylight wan]"

Stolen from the ashen banquets of death - Iris Tree "[Lolling in snow, like kings in ermine coats]"

Tread out the ashes of midnight - Iris Tree "[Slowly the pale feet of morning]"

Wreathing love with poppies and with ashes - Iris Tree "[Sun-aureoled lilies are your priestesses]"

Time's ashen coverlet - Iris Tree "[Woods of brown gloom sombring with the hush of death]"

Chewing the bitter ashes - Richard Chenevix Trench "Dedicatory Lines"

Ash dancing among a living flame - Jacqueline Allen Trimble "Walking Beside the Cemetery, Olivia Street, Key West"

In ashes light years deep - John Updike "Lunar Eclipse"

our pillow talk of acceptance & cigarette ash - upfromsumdirt (Ron Davis) "A Blues For Eunice Waymon"

Embers of hope upon the ashen air - Emile Verhaeren "Les Villages Illusoires: The Rope-Maker" transl. by Alma Strettell

Scrawled in the ashes of who I might have been - Emily Ruth Verona "A Shiva"

Our hair is ashes - Derek Walcott "A Letter from the Old Guard"

Didn't fear ashes or weeping - Roberta Hill Whiteman "A Nation Wrapped in Stone"

Entered eternity as ash - Matthew Wimberley "The Celebrated Colors of the Local Sunsets"

The ashes of battle - Nancy Wood "Shaman's Circle"

Last ashes of satisfaction - Tobias Wray "The Last Orgasm"

Their blood full of ashes - Charles Wright "The Children of the Plain"

Turn around and become ash bone - Jay Wright "The Healing Improvisation of Hair"

A bright spark where black ashes are - Elinor Wylie "Incantation"

Who breathe under the red ash - Veronica Zondek "cold fire 4" transl. by Katherine Silver

Wrapped in ash paper and fog - Veronica Zondek "cold fire 17" transl. by Katherine Silver


To the ash-strewn summit of death - John Gould Fletcher "Court Lady Standing Under a Plum Tree"


Ash trees wilting by the creek - John James "Forget the Song"

Ash-trees standing ankle-deep in brier - Edward Thomas "The Chalk-Pit"

Honoured by a few ash-trees - Edward Thomas "For These"


every dead-ash sun a crumbled cipher - Emily Gaskin "Anthropic Principle"


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