April 6, 2009: Distressed Haiku, Donald Hall

Distressed Haiku
Donald Hall

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.
the whole sky.


[Happy Red Sox (…and everyone else) opening day!  This, like lots of Hall’s poems, is about his wife Jane Kenyon, who died of cancer, and who wrote yesterday’s poem.]

A year ago today: Question, May Swenson
Two years ago: Song, Adrienne Rich
Three years ago: Scheherazade, Richard Siken
Four years ago: What the Living Do, Marie Howe