writing in the dust

Jane Kenyon and Donald Hall

I was at a lecture last night given by Daniel Sulmasy, a Franciscan friar who has an M.D. and a Ph.D. in philosophy. He’s written several books on medicine and spirituality.  But I’m not really wanting to blog about his lecture or ideas, as interesting as it was and they are. Mainly I just want to pass along the names of a couple of poets whose poems Dr. Sulmasy read during the lecture: Jane Kenyon and Donald Hall. The poem he read from Kenyon I happened to have read earlier in the week (see this post). But I hadn’t heard of Hall before, who, in turns out, was Poet Laureate from 2006-07, following Ted Kooser, and was married to Kenyon until she died in 1995.

Here’s a tiny excerpt from a cycle of poems Hall wrote after the death of his wife. Maybe it’ll spark your interest, as it has mine.

[…]
Do you remember our first
January at Eagle Pond,
the coldest in a century?
It dropped to thirty-eight below—
with no furnace, no storm
windows or insulation.
We sat reading or writing
in our two big chairs, either
side of the Glenwood,
and made love on the floor
with the stove open and roaring.
You were twenty eight.
If someone had told us then
you would die in nineteen years,
would it have sounded
like almost enough time?
[…]