Poetry Friday--New Hampshire

Photo by mwri
Today I'm enjoying a little mini-vacation with friends up in northern New Hampshire. I thought, therefore, that I'd share a poem about New Hampshire, by a New Hampshire poet, Donald Hall, and appropriately named, "New Hampshire"

A bear sleeps in a cellarhole; pine needles
heap over a granite doorstep; a well brims
with acorns and the broken leaves of an oak
which grew where an anvil rusted in a forge.

Inside an anvil, inside a bear, inside a leaf,
a bark of rust grows on the tree of a gas pump;
EAT signs gather like leaves in the shallow
cellars of diners; a wildcat waits for deer

on the roof of a car. Blacktop buckled by frost
starts goldenrod from the highway. Fat honey bees
meander among raspberries, where a quarrel
of vines crawls into the spilled body of a plane.

from Old and New Poems (Ticknor & Fields, 1990)

Today, the Poetry Friday Round-Up is being held at Jama Rattigan's Alphabet Soup. Stop by!