Her Garden
By 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.
About the author
(Excerpted from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/donald-hall)
Donald Hall (1926 – 2018) was considered one of the major American poets of his generation. His poetry explores the longing for a more bucolic past and reflects the poet’s abiding reverence for nature. Although Hall gained early success with his first collection, Exiles and Marriages (1955), his later poetry is generally regarded as the best of his career. Often compared favorably with such writers as James Dickey, Robert Bly, and James Wright, Hall used simple, direct language to evoke surrealistic imagery. In addition to his poetry, Hall built a respected body of prose that includes essays, short fiction, plays, and children’s books. Hall, who lived on the New Hampshire farm he visited in summers as a boy, was also noted for the anthologies he has edited and is a popular teacher, speaker, and reader of his own poems.