We’re still doing poem cards from the deck I found in my parents’ basement. Because they're easy like Sunday morning.
Time has an end, they say
sea-walls are worn away
by wind and the sea-spray.
not the herb,
rosemary.
This was from “Time Has an End” by H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886-1961)
H.D. liked Greece and Egyptian mythology and hey, she was a Moravian from Pennsylvania! My parents are about to move from Lititz, Pennsylvania, where 
they’ve lived in retirement for many years and Lititz was founded as an exclusive Moravian community so I know a little somethin-somethin about Moravians. As does anyone else who owns that multi-pointed Christmas decoration, the Moravian star. H.D. moved to Europe in 1911, however, and folded in with Ezra Pound’s Imagists. She was “briefly engaged” to Ezra and it was his idea for her to sign her poems as “H.D. Imagiste.” (I’m not fact checking these cards, btw.) The card calls her a “poet’s poet” and I like this as a description of experimental poets, like pure vs. practical science. She was also in psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud. She also translated Sappo's poems.
I see only a summer’s
transparency, I sing nothing but wind,
while history creaks on its carnival floats
hoarding medals and shrouds
and passes me by, and I stand by myself
in the spring, knowing nothing but rivers.
This is from “Pastoral” by Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), translated by Ben Belitt. Neruda is much loved for his “immense, heroic, prophetic, romantic and moving universe of words” as the card says and he was also controversial due to his “radical socialist politics,” (is this card bias or actually how we refer to his political stance?). He was exiled from Chile between 1936-1952. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971.
The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over the harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
From “Fog” by Carl Sandburg (1878-1967). That’s the poem in its entirety! It's a very popular and anthologized poem, according to my card, even though, like Walt Whitman, Sandburg went on to be know for his longer, more effusive lines.
Week Five Stats:
1 white American colonialist female
1 black American female
1 white American female
1 white American male
1 white Andalusian male
1 Chilean male
1 white English male
1 white French male
1 white Italian male
1 white Welsh male
1 1300s poet
1 1600s poet
1 1700-1800s poet
2 1800s poets
5 1900s poets
