Affirmation by Donald Hall

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Affirmation by Donald Hall

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Here is a poem about mortality—Donald Hall often expressed that dying gets in the way of living. When his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, passed away, the devastation was palpable in his poems. But over time his work became a reckoning with death, and how it is an important part of life.

Affirmation

Donald Hall

To grow old is to lose everything.

Aging, everybody knows it.

Even when we are young,

we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads

when a grandfather dies.

Then we row for years on the midsummer

pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,

that began without harm, scatters

into debris on the shore,

and a friend from school drops

cold on a rocky strand.

If a new love carries us

past middle age, our wife will die

at her strongest and most beautiful.

New women come and go. All go.

The pretty lover who announces

that she is temporary

is temporary. The bold woman,

middle-aged against our old age,

sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.

Another friend of decades estranges himself

in words that pollute thirty years.

Let us stifle under mud at the pond’s edge

and affirm that it is fitting

and delicious to lose everything..

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This poem appeared in

The Painted Bed by Donald Hall

, published by Ecco, 2003. Shared here with profound gratitude.

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