White Apples by Donald Hall
White Apples
Donald Hallwhen 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 doorwhite apples and the taste of stone
if he called again
I would put on my coat and galoshes
SELECTED BY HUA XI
In just a few lines and with absolutely simple vocabulary, Donald Hall’s poem captures the lingering devastation of grief. It is not only the narrator’s experience which makes this poem memorable but the images of the white apples, the stone and the galoshes. In a compressed few lines, these couple of vocabulary words are able to conjure a world that is timeless, calling forth images of wilderness and centuries.
ABOUT HUA XI
Hua Xi is a writer and artist. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The Nation, The New Republic and elsewhere. She is currently a Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford.
KEEP READING
SHARED WITH GRATITUDE
This poem appeared in White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems, 1946-2006 by Donald Hall, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006. (Available on: Amazon • Bookshop)
DESCRIPTION
“White Apples and the Taste of Stone is the definitive lifetime work of an American master — with a bound-in audio CD of selections read by the author.
One of the most significant poets of his generation, Donald Hall has garnered numerous accolades and honors, including the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. White Apples and the Taste of Stone collects more than two hundred poems from across sixty years of Hall’s celebrated career, with new poems recently published in The New Yorker, the American Poetry Review, and the New York Times. Greatly anticipated, this is Hall’s first selected volume in fifteen years, and also the first to include poems from his seminal bestseller, Without.
The bound-in audio CD was specially recorded by Hall for this publication — more than an hour of favorite poems from throughout the book. Hall’s distinctive, sonorous voice and inimitable humor provide a perfect companion for fans of his work and for classroom use.” (Source)
ABOUT DONALD HALL
Donald Hall was born on September 20, 1928, and grew up in Hamden, Connecticut. Hall earned a BA from Harvard University and a bachelor of letters degree from the University of Oxford. In 1955, Hall published his first poetry collection, Exiles and Marriages (Viking Press), which was the Academy of American Poet’s Lamont Poetry Selection 1956. His other books are The Selected Poems of Donald Hall (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015); The Painted Bed (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002);… (more)
Read more poems by Donald Hall • Find books by this poet on Amazon • Bookshop • Or view my library
ENDNOTES
- This is Day 51 of Poems We Carry, celebrating the 20th anniversary of Read A Little Poetry—a living archive I’ve nurtured for two decades. For this milestone series, I invited writers I deeply admire to share poems that have meant something to them over time.
- Explore other works in pursuit of: death • grief • memory • Or browse the index
- If this work resonates with you, please consider supporting the archive. Thank you for reading.
