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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jane Kenyon
Jane Kenyon
Jane Kenyon was born on May 23, 1947, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and grew...
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FURTHER READING
Poems about Loss
Affirmation
by Donald Hall
Ashes
by Paula Meehan
Burning the Old Year
by Naomi Shihab Nye
Catastrophe Theory III
by Mary Jo Bang
Challenger
by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon
from Projection
by Lidija Dimkovska
Haunted
by Naomi Shihab Nye
I Found Her Out There
by Thomas Hardy
I'll Try to Tell You What I Know
by Martha Serpas
Loss
by Carl Adamshick
please advise stop [I was dragging a ladder slowly over stones stop]
by Rusty Morrison
Room in Antwerp
by Laure-Anne Bosselaar
Some People
by Wislawa Szymborska
Song ["When I am dead, my dearest"]
by Christina Rossetti
the lost baby poem
by Lucille Clifton
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Heavy Summer Rain

 
by Jane Kenyon

The grasses in the field have toppled,
and in places it seems that a large, now
absent, animal must have passed the night.
The hay will right itself if the day

turns dry. I miss you steadily, painfully.
None of your blustering entrances
or exits, doors swinging wildly
on their hinges, or your huge unconscious
sighs when you read something sad,
like Henry Adams’s letters from Japan,
where he traveled after Clover died.

Everything blooming bows down in the rain:
white irises, red peonies; and the poppies
with their black and secret centers
lie shattered on the lawn.






Jane Kenyon, "Heavy Summer Rain" from Collected Poems. Copyright © 2005 by the Estate of Jane Kenyon. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Graywolf Press, graywolfpress.org.
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