thoughtless with flowers

Here's a rather wonderful Donald Hall poem, taken from the pictured 2011 Anthology:


Digging

One midnight, after a day when lilies
lift themselves out of the ground while you watch them,
and you come into the house at dark
your fingers grubby with digging, your eyes
vague with the pleasure of digging,
 
let a wind raised from the South
climb through your bedroom window, lift you in its arms
--- you have become as small as a seed ---
and carry you out of the house, over the black garden,
spinning and fluttering,
 
and drop you in cracked ground.
The dirt will be cool, rough to your clasped skin
like a man you have never known.
You will die into the ground
in a deep sleep, surrendered to water.
 
You will wake suffering
a widening pain in your side, a breach
gapped in your tight ribs
where a green shoot struggles to lift itself upwards
through the tomb of your dead flesh
 
to the sun, to 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.

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Donald Hall (1928 - )

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