Raised in the Midwest, Jane Kenyon later lived with her husband, poet Donald Hall, on a farm in New Hampshire. In 1993 Bill Moyers made an Emmy award-winning documentary about the literary couple called “A Life Together.” Author of four collections of poetry, Kenyon was the poet laureate of New Hampshire at the time of her death from leukemia at age 47.
More By This Poet
Not Here
Searching for pillowcases trimmed
with lace that my mother-in-law
once made, I open the chest of drawers
upstairs to find that mice
have chewed the blue and white linen
dishtowels to make their nest,
and bedded themselves
among embroidered dresser scarves
and fingertip towels.
Tufts of fibers, droppings like...
Let Evening Come
Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.
Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.
Let dew collect on the hoe...
Happiness
There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.
And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost,...