Poem-a-Day - "Disputed Tread" by Hazel Hall

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August 27, 2022 
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Disputed Tread

Hazel Hall

Where she steps a whir,
Like dust about her feet,
Follows after her
Down the dustless street.

Something struggles there:
The forces that contend
Violently as to where
Her pathway is to end.

Issues, like great hands, grip
And wrestle for her tread;
One would strive to trip,
And one would go ahead.

Conflicting strengths in her 
Grapple to guide her feet,
Raising an unclean whir,
Like dust, upon the street.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on August 27, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“Disputed Tread” first appeared in Walkers (Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1922). The poem, composed of rhyming quatrains in a loose trimeter, likens the blur, or “whir,” of the movement of one’s feet to the cloud of dust it would otherwise rouse on a dusty road. Regarding the poem, poet Margery Swett Mansfield remarks, in her review of Hall’s Walkers published in Poetry vol. 22, no. 5 (August 1923), titled “Beyond Sight and Hearing,” that “[s]urely no one has ever wrung more meaning from a footfall! Feet tell her the truth even when her mind would prefer the more comforting conclusions of philosophy.”

Hazel Hall, born on February 7, 1886 in St. Paul, was an American poet. During her elder years, she published two collections, Curtains (John Lane Company, 1921) and Walkers (Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1922), while her other works were published posthumously. She died on May 11, 1924.

Walkers
(Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1922)

“The Fruit Garden Path” by Amy Lowell
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“Paths” by Dorothy Parker
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Thanks to Donika Kelly, author of The Renunciations (Graywolf Press, 2021), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Read or listen to a Q&A about Kelly’s curatorial approach and find out more about our guest editors for the year
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