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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lynda Hull
Lynda Hull
Born in New Jersey in 1954, Lynda Hull wrote two well-received collections before her death in 1994, and a third, The Only World, was published posthumously. Her Collected Poems was published in 2006...
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FURTHER READING
Poems About Aging
Affirmation
by Donald Hall
Age
by Robert Creeley
Blues
by Elizabeth Alexander
Do not go gentle into that good night
by Dylan Thomas
First Gestures
by Julia Spicher Kasdorf
In View of the Fact
by A. R. Ammons
My Lost Youth
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The Young Man's Song
by W. B. Yeats
To Chloe: Who for his sake wished herself younger
by William Cartwright
When You are Old
by W. B. Yeats
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At Thirty  
by Lynda Hull

Whole years I knew only nights: automats
& damp streets, the Lower East Side steep

with narrow rooms where sleepers turn beneath
alien skies. I ran when doorways spoke

rife with smoke & zippers. But it was only the heart's
racketing flywheel stuttering I want, I want

until exhaustion, until I was a guest in the yoke
of my body by the last margin of land where the river

mingles with the sea & far off daylight whitens,
a rending & yielding I must kneel before, as

barges loose glittering mineral freight
& behind me façades gleam with pigeons

folding iridescent wings. Their voices echo
in my voice naming what is lost, what remains.



Copyright © 2006 by Lynda Hull. Reprinted from Collected Poems with the permission of Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota.
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