Poetry meme

[squeequeg]

"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 toward green.

*

The Boston Red Sox win
a hundred straight games.
The mouse rips
the throat of the lion

and the dead return.

-- Donald Hall
from The Painted Bed, 2002.

When you see this, post a poem in your journal.

Comments

[stealthmuffin.livejournal.com]

No, I haven't. I'll go looking for it, though. Thanks!

[kassrachel.livejournal.com]

It may be helpful to know (as you may know already, so forgive me if this is knowledge you already have) that Donald Hall was married for many years to poet Jane Kenyon (one of my very favorite poets ever). She was twenty years younger than he, and they both assumed he would predecease her; then she was diagnosed with leukemia. She died in 1995. Without was his first collection of poems after her death, and most of the collection either engages with her illness/passing, or is written in the form of letters to her after she's gone. I think it's phenomenal -- but do have a box of tissues on-hand when you read it. *g*

It's a lovely companion to Otherwise, Jane's collection of new and selected poems, actually.