Theme · 4 poems

Missing You Poems

For the gap someone leaves — across a country, an ocean, or further: poems about absence, longing, and the strange arithmetic of distance, where one person missing makes everywhere feel emptier.

Longing may be poetry's founding emotion: the Japanese court traded tanka about sleeves wet with waiting, Sappho counted the stars around an absent moon, and every sailor's ballad since has been a missing-you poem with a tide schedule. Absence concentrates love the way distance concentrates light — which is why these poems are often more intense than anything written face to face.

The form covers two kinds of gone, and it's worth knowing which you're holding. For the long-distance kind — deployments, semesters, oceans — choose poems that end on 'soon.' For the deeper kind, choose ones that let the missing exist without demanding it stop. Both deserve their own poem, and sending one remains the most efficient way ever devised to say 'you are not unaccompanied in my head.'

LengthForm

After the Train

The QuillOak Editors

the train pulls awayand you wave until it bendsout of sight, then stand

5 lines · tanka

The Cedar Box

The QuillOak Editors

folding your lettersinto the cedar box, Ikeep what keeps, and still

5 lines · tanka

Remembrance

Emily Brontë · 1845

Cold in the earth—and the deep snow piled above thee,Far, far, removed, cold in the dreary grave!Have I forgot, my only Love, to love thee,

33 lines · elegy

Rock Me to Sleep

Elizabeth Akers Allen · 1859

Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight,Make me a child again just for to-night!Mother, come back from the echoless shore,

48 lines · lyric

Common questions

What is a good poem to send someone you miss?

For long distance, a short verse ending on 'soon'; for deeper absence, lines that admit the missing without demanding it stop. Match the poem to which kind of gone it is.

What is a famous poem about missing someone?

Auden's 'Funeral Blues' for grief's missing; for the gentler ache of distance, the Japanese court poets perfected longing in tanka a thousand years ago.