 | PSOetry: Names of Horses |
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Names of Horses ~ Donald Hall
All winter your brute shoulders strained against collars, padding
and steerhide over the ash hames, to haul
sledges of cordwood for drying through spring and summer,
for the Glenwood stove next winter, and for the simmering range.
In April you pulled cartloads of manure to spread on the fields,
dark manure of Holsteins, and knobs of your own clustered with oats.
All summer you mowed the grass in meadow and hayfield, the mowing machine
clacketing beside you, while the sun walked high in the morning;
and after noon’s heat, you pulled a clawed rake through the same acres,
gathering stacks, and dragged the wagon from stack to stack,
and the built hayrack back, uphill to the chaffy barn,
three loads of hay a day from standing grass in the morning.
Sundays you trotted the two miles to church with the light load
a leather quartertop buggy, and grazed in the sound of hymns.
Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill
of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.
When you were old and lame, when your shoulders hurt bending to graze,
one October the man, who fed you and kept you, and harnessed you every morning,
led you through corn stubble to sandy ground above Eagle Pond,
and dug a hole beside you where you stood shuddering in your skin,
and lay the shotgun’s muzzle in the boneless hollow behind your ear,
and fired the slug into your brain, and felled you into your grave,
shoveling sand to cover you, setting goldenrod upright above you,
where by next summer a dent in the ground made your monument.
For a hundred and fifty years, in the Pasture of dead horses,
roots of pine trees pushed through the pale curves of your ribs,
yellow blossoms flourished above you in autumn, and in winter
frost heaved your bones in the ground – old toilers, soil makers:
O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost.
***
This poem is one I was “forced” to study in a college poetry course, then proceeded to never forget. Even reading it again just now, I am still overcome by myriad emotional reactions to the sacred-ness, the eternal-ness of all that is right and true that is spoken to, celebrated here. Anybody care to add to this? Please feel free.
I would link you to the site where I found the poem, but it contained pop-ups and I don’t want to subject you to that.
Here is more on the poet, Mr. Hall, which was a fun read for me, as my professor had never forced the issue and so I’d never delved deeper.
xo, Angela
What a wonderful poem! Thank you!
(via Angela): NPR did a brief interview with Hall on The Lehrer Report not too long ago. It was shortly after Hall was named “poet laureate”. In the interview, he was shown hobbling around (he’s pretty old) his New England house. Hall seemed refreshingly down to earth and likeable — like his poems, I guess. I’d never heard of him before the interview and I’d never seen any of his work until you posted your poem. Thanks!
Extremely moving. How could anyone read this, just this poem, and not “get” why poetry is a worthwhile endeavor.
Perhaps I should buy a collection of Mr. Halls or two. There seems to be plenty.
In science I engage life in one way. In poetry, life is engaged in a wonderfully different other way. Thank you, Angela.
I went to high school in New Hampshire and Mr. Hall came and read his poetry to us. I loved it. In college, where Robert Frost was revered, Hall was spoken of as a Frost wannabe, without the knife-edged wit. But I always liked his work – and this poem is a good example of why; it is Frost with much more heart. Thanks, Angela; I love these poetic side roads on which you are taking us.
Interesting, Booklover35, as I’ve never liked Frost’s works. Although I have to admit to only studying what was put in front of us. Maybe I need to check out more of his poetry and re-evaluate?
Frost had a heart of New England granite. As the poem you chose has shown, Hall can have the warm glow of a New England autumn day. Given a choice of picking up one or the other again, I’d go with Hall.
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