Forget the Album, Buy the Single

A good friend sent this to me the other day and it inspired me to go out and buy some more Hilda Doolittle aka HD. (No relation to Dr. Doolittle who founded the Pushmepullyou Institute.) She published this in 1945 as a response to the London Blitz and the tragedies everyone around her experienced, which sounds really trite until you start reading and it socks you in the jaw. She invokes mythology, Scripture, writing-as-immortality to make some sense out of things and find a way to redeem the time.


But the real moral here? If you send me some poetry you like, there's a very good chance I'll post something about it. Thanks for the poem, Rachel!


Usually I don't like taking fragments or excerpts of poems out of context, but tonight I'll make an exception. I can't seem to get this one out of my head, even though I can't quite seem to figure out what it  means, either. (Maybe if I read the rest of the book-length poem...)


I also like the unrhymed, unmetered couplets, as well as the internal rhymes here and there or just pleasing consonances of words that give it all a feel that this is actually a poem and not just a thought somebody broke up into stanzas.

from The Walls Do Not Fall

HD

But we fight for life,
we fight, they say, for breath,


so what good are your scribblings?
this - we take them with us


beyond death; Mercury, Hermes, Thoth
invented the script, letters, palette;


the indicated flute or lyre-notes
on papyrus or parchment


are magic, indelibly stamped
on the atmosphere somewhere,


forever; remember, O Sword,
you are the younger brother, the latter-born,


your Triumph, however exultant,
must one day be over,


in the beginning
was the Word.