Poeticous Logo
en
English Español Français Italiano
Donald Hall

Donald Hall

Distressed Haiku

In a week or ten days
the snow and ice
will melt from Cemetery Road.
 
I’m coming! Don’t move!
 
Once again it is April.
Today is the day
we would have been married
twenty-six years.
 
I finished with April
halfway through March.
 
You think that their
dying is the worst
thing that could happen.
 
Then they stay dead.
 
Will Hall ever write
lines that do anything
but whine and complain?
 
In April the blue
mountain revises
from white to green.
 
The Boston Red Sox win
a hundred straight games.
The mouse rips
the throat of the lion
 
and the dead return.

#Americans #USPoetLaureate #XXCentury #XXICentury

2
Enjoyed this read? Treat us to a coffee!.
Your help allows us to exist.
Liked or faved by...
Other works by Donald Hall...
Gold

Pale gold of the walls, gold of the centers of daisies, yellow roses pressing from a clear bowl. All day we lay on the bed, my hand stroking the deep

 1
 2
When the Young Husband...

When the young husband picked up his fri… in the taxi one block from her townhouse… first lunch together, in a hotel dining… with a room key in his pocket, midtown traffic gridlocked and was abrup…

 2
Sudden Things

A storm was coming, that was why it was dark. The wind was blowing the fronds of the palm trees off. They were maples. I looked out the window across the big lawn. The house was huge, f...

Eating the Pig

Twelve people, most of us strangers, sta… in Ann Arbor, drinking Cribari from jar… Then two young men, who cooked him, carry him to the table on a large square of plywood: his body

Poem with One Fact

“At pet stores in Detroit, you can buy frozen rats for seventy-five cents apiece, to feed your pet boa constrictor” back home in Grosse Pointe,

#FreeVerse

The Seventh Inning

1. Baseball, I warrant, is not the wh… occupation of the aging boy. Far from it: There are cats and roses; there is her water body. She fills the skin of her legs up, like water;

The Wreckage

At the edge of the city the pickerel vomits and dies. The river with its white hair staggers to the sea. My life lay crumpled like a smashed car. Windows barred, ivy, square stone.

#FreeVerse

The Alligator Bride

The clock of my days winds down. The cat eats sparrows outside my window. Once, she brought me a small rabbit which we devoured together, under the Empire Table

The Wedding Couple

Fifteen years ago his heart infarcted and he stopped smoking. At eighty he trembled like a birch but remained vigorous and acute.

 1
 3
Black and white photo of young girl drowning. Photo by Christopher Campbell, Unsplash
Safe Sex

If he and she do not know each other, an… they will not meet again; if he avoids a… if she has grown insensible skin under s… only the tribute of another’s cry; if th… as revenge on old lovers or families of…

 4
White Apples

when my father had been dead a week I woke with his voice in my ear I sat up in bed and held my breath

 1
 1
Maple Syrup

August, goldenrod blowing. We walk into the graveyard, to find my grandfather’s grave. Ten years ago I came here last, bringing marigolds from the round garden

The Moon

A woman who lived in a tree caught the moon in a kettle. The wind on the roof of the tree thumped

 1
 3
A Poet at Twenty

Images leap with him from branch to branch. His eyes brighten, his head cocks, he pauses under a green bough, And when I see him I want to hide him somewhere. The other wood ...

 1
The Man in the Dead Machine

High on a slope in New Guinea The Grumman Hellcat lodges among bright vines as thick as arms. In 1943, the clenched hand of a pilot




Top