#Donald Hall

[havingapoemwithyou]

summer kitchen by Donald Hall

[apoemaday]

White Apples

by Donald Hall

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 and stared at the pale closed door

white apples and the taste of stone

if he called again I would put on my coat and galoshes

[soracities]

Donald Hall, on solitude and the death of his wife, Jane Kenyon, pub. The New Yorker (2016) [ID'd]

[uwmspeccoll]

Happy New Year!

What better way to begin the New Year than with wood engravings of serene winter scenes by the New England wood engraver Thomas W. Nason (1889-1971). These images are from Here at Eagle Pond by the America poet, writer, and U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall (1928-2018), published in New York by Ticknor & Fields in 1990. Hall, along with his wife, poet and author Jane Kenyon (1947–1995), lived at Eagle Pond Farm in Wilmot, New Hampshire, a small town in Merrimack County, from 1975 until his death. This book is a meditation on life at Eagle Pond. When he moved there from Michigan, Hall, a New Englander himself, writes:

For me, it was coming home, and it was coming home to a place of language. . . . When I was twelve or thirteen, it was here that I began writing poetry. This farm provided the subject matter for the first poems I published, when I was sixteen. . . .

The evocative wood engravings of Thomas W. Nason were reproduced for this publication from the prints in the collection of the Boston Public Library. Our copy is another donation from our friend Jerry Buff.

We wish you a bright and wonderous New Year!

View posts from New Years past.

View more wood engravings by Thomas W. Nason.

View more posts with wood engravings!

[batglare101]

I’m a HUGE fan of DC/WC AUs!! May I ask if you have any concepts for Hawk and Dove?

52. Doveheart

yes!!! hopefully this is the correct hawk and dove you were expecting - they are in my au! c: (hawk is on the following post)

[thesunpersists]

The Third Thing, Chapter 4

"We did not spend our days gazing into each other’s eyes. We did that gazing when we made love or when one of us was in trouble, but most of the time our gazes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing."

Snapshots of Katniss and Peeta's post-war life. Each chapter is inspired by and loosely based on a quote from "The Third Thing" by Donald Hall.

—

Chapter 4: “For many couples, children are a third thing.”

Read on ao3!

[vedantvarma]

What we did: love. We did not spend our days gazing into each other’s eyes. We did that gazing when we made love or when one of us was in trouble, but most of the time our gazes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing. Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention.

Beautiful words that tell a beautiful story.

The concept of ‘the third thing’ resonated with me deeply.

So much of love is rooted in the everyday. Little things that will not make it into a diary or journal. And yet, when it matters the most, when you seek to remember a loved one, it is to the routine that we shine a spotlight on; of stories and things shared, discussed, agreed or disagreed upon. Some seminal life events, but mostly the mundane.

[dc-tournaments]

Why do they deserve to win?

Iris West

Dove

[dk-thrive]

as if everything heavy and cold vanished at once... / weightless as clouds in the great day’s windy April.

Donald Hall, from “Great Day in the Cows’ House” in “Great Day in the Cows' House” (Published by Ives Street Press, Mt. Carmel, CT, 1984)

[shy-girl04]

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

and stared at the pale closed door

white apples and the taste of stone

if he called again

I would put on my coat and galoshes

By Donald Hall

[lunchboxpoems]

WEEDS AND PEONIES

Your peonies burst out, white as snow squalls, with red flecks at their shaggy centers in your border of prodigies by the porch. I carry one magnanimous blossom indoors and float it in a glass bowl, as you used to do.

Ordinary pleasures, contentment recollected, blow like snow into the abandoned garden, overcoming the daisies. Your blue coat vanishes down Pond Road into imagined snowflakes with Gus at your side, his great tail swinging,

but you will not reappear, tired and satisfied, and grief’s repeated particles suffuse the air like the dog yipping through the entire night, or the cat stretching awake, then curling as if to dream of her mother’s milky nipples.

A raccoon dislodged a geranium from its pot. Flowers, roots, and dirt lay upended in the back garden where lilies begin their daily excursions above stone walls in the season of old roses. I pace beside weeds

and snowy peonies, staring at Mount Kearsarge where you climbed wearing purple hiking boots. “Hurry back. Be careful, climbing down.” Your peonies lean their vast heads westward as if they might topple. Some topple.

DONALD HALL

[davidhudson]

Donald Hall, September 20, 1928 – June 23, 2018.

[withnailrules]

“The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is—it must be something you cannot possibly do.”

— sculptor Henry Moore to poet Donald Hall

[cutiewithawakenedheart]

"The air of your garden

where you will blossom

in the shape of your own self, thoughtless

with flowers, speaking

to bees, in the language of green and yellow, white and red."

----Donald Hall

[thesunpersists]

The Third Thing, Chapter 12

Final Chapter

"We did not spend our days gazing into each other’s eyes. We did that gazing when we made love or when one of us was in trouble, but most of the time our gazes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing."

Snapshots of Katniss and Peeta's post-war life. Each chapter is inspired by and loosely based on a quote from "The Third Thing" by Donald Hall.

—

Chapter 12: “We had our summer afternoons at the pond, which for ten years made a third thing. After naps we loaded up books and blankets and walked across Route 4 and the old railroad to the steep slippery bank that led down to our private beach on Eagle Pond. Soft moss underfoot sent little red flowers up. Ghost birches leaned over water with wild strawberry plants growing under them. [...] Then, one summer, leakage from the Danbury landfill turned the pond orange. It stank. The water was not hazardous but it was ruined. A few years later the pond came back but we seldom returned to our afternoons there.

Sometimes you lose a third thing.”

Read on ao3!

[blessedrestlessness]