# Reading > Poems, Poets, and Poetry >  My son, my executioner-Donald Hall

## PistisSophia

My son, my executioner
I take you in my arms
Quiet and small and just astir
and whom my body warms

Sweet death, small son, 
our instrument of immortality,
your cries and hunger document
our bodily decay.

We twenty two and twenty five,
who seemed to live forever,
observe enduring life in you
and start to die together.

~~~Donald Hall

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## mono

Hello, PistisSophia, welcome to the forum.
Thank you for sharing this work by Donald Hall. I have never actually heard of him until now, but, after doing some research about him, he writes beautifully! Some of his work reminds me somewhat of the more controversial of his time, seeming explicit, but beauty has mysterious ways.
A few additional good ones I found:

White Apples

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

-----

Je Suis Une Table

It has happened suddenly,
by surprise, in an arbor,
or while drinking good coffee,
after speaking, or before,

that I dumbly inhabit
a density; in language,
there is nothing to stop it,
for nothing retains an edge.

Simple ignorance presents,
later, words for a function,
but it is common pretense
of speech, by a convention,

and there is nothing at all
but inner silence, nothing
to relieve on principle
now this intense thickening.

-----

An Old Life

Snow fell in the night.
At five-fifteen I woke to a bluish
mounded softness where 
the Honda was. Cat fed and coffee made,
I broomed snow off the car
and drove to the Kearsarge Mini-Mart
before Amy opened 
to yank my Globe out of the bundle.
Back, I set my cup of coffee
beside Jane, still half-asleep,
murmuring stuporous
thanks in the aquamarine morning.
Then I sat in my blue chair 
with blueberry bagels and strong
black coffee reading news, 
the obits, the comics, and the sports.
Carrying my cup twenty feet, 
I sat myself at the desk
for this day's lifelong
engagement with the one task and desire.

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## PistisSophia

There are so many relatively unknown poets who never got their due, who spoke so sweet and succinctly.

Another poet, Vaquel Lindsay, who authored "The Leaden Eyed" is another poet that remains basically little known....

"not that they die,
but that they die like sheep"

V. Lindsay

 :Cool:

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## amuse

thank goodness you joined!  :Smile:  i like this Donald Hall.

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## Bongitybongbong

> White Apples
> 
> 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
> ...


This is a poem that I wish I read earlier.

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## PistisSophia

I had no idea until recently that Vachel Lindsay was a suicide!!!

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## PistisSophia

The Leaden-Eyed 

Let not young souls be smothered out before
They do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride.
It is the world's one crime its babes grow dull,
Its poor are ox-like, limp and leaden-eyed.

Not that they starve, but starve so dreamlessly;
Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap;
Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve;
Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.

-- Vachel Lindsay

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