Black hollyhocks
Here’s a poem by Donald Hall about his wife Jane Kenyon’s garden. Both acclaimed poets, Hall and Kenyon moved in 1975 to Eagle Pond Farm in Wilmot, New Hampshire which had been in Hall’s family for many generations. They lived and wrote and gardened there together until Jane Kenyon died from leukemia in 1995 at the age of forty-eight.
Her Gardenby Donald Hall I let her garden go.
let it go, let it go
How can I watch the hummingbird
Hover to sip
With its beak’s tip
The purple bee balm – whirring as we heard
It years ago? The weeds rise rank and thick
let it go, let it go
Where annuals grew and burdock grows
Where standing she
At once could see
The peony, the lily, and the rose
Rise over brick. She’d laid in patterns. Moss
let it go, let it go
Turns the bricks green, softening them
By the gray rocks
Where hollyhocks
That lofted while she lived, stem by tall stem,
Blossom with loss. For more poems by Donald Hall please visit: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/donald-hall
It touched my soul…can See The waves of color, smell the earth, The lilly, The rose, The sunbeam caresses my skin, life is swirring all around…and I can See The one I loved , within, and memories like a warm, melancholic summerbreeze …this painful break , all this bursting life, but my love is gone …though, embraced and caught , like always, by all this beauty, and my/ our (!) love for it, I can let go…
So heartfelt and lovely — thank you!