Poetic Divination

“Distressed Haiku” by Donald Hall

In a week or ten days

the snow and ice

will melt from Cemetery Road.

I’m coming! Don’t move!

Once again it is April.

Today is the day

we would have been married

twenty-six years.

I finished with April

halfway through March.

You think that their

dying is the worst

thing that could happen.

Then they stay dead.

Will Hall ever write

lines that do anything

but whine and complain?

In April the blue

mountain revises

from white to green.

The Boston Red Sox win

a hundred straight games.

The mouse rips

the throat of the lion

and the dead return.