Gold
Pale gold of the walls, gold of the centers of daisies, yellow roses pressing from a clear bowl. All day we lay on the bed, my hand stroking the deep gold of your thighs and your back. We slept and woke entering the golden room together, lay down in it breathing quickly, then slowly again, caressing and dozing, your hand sleepily touching my hair now. We made in those days tiny identical rooms inside our bodies which the men who uncover our graves will find in a thousand years, shining and whole.
Credit
From Old and New Poems by Donald Hall, published by Ticknor & Fields. Copyright © 1990 by Donald Hall. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
Author
Donald Hall
Donald Hall was born on September 20, 1928, and grew up in Hamden, Connecticut. He began writing as an adolescent and attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference at the age of sixteen—the same year he had his first work published. Hall earned a BA from Harvard University in 1951 and a bachelor of letters degree from the University of Oxford in 1953. The next year he received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, followed by a fellowship from Harvard University.
Date Published
01/01/1990