TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown. 

One of the poets I discovered in college was H.D. Born Hilda Doolittle, she published under her initials. I took a class on Modernism, and we read H.D. and some of her contemporaries: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams, among others. 

I remember being wowed by her poems, which were experimental and strange, unlike anything I’d read before—and unlike anything I’ve read since.

One brief poem, “Oread,” has stayed with me since that class almost 30 years ago:

                                Whirl up, sea—                                  
                                whirl your pointed pines,                                  
                                splash your great pines,                                  
                                on our rocks,                                  
                                hurl your green over us,                                  
                                cover us with your pools of fir.

The sounds! The way metaphor blends two landscapes: the sea and the forest! The poem thrilled me. And I think H.D.'s work thrills the author of the poem I’m about to share with you, too. It addresses her from our contemporary world, and I think it does so with music, strangeness, and verve that H.D. herself would admire.

Come Back!
by Camille Guthrie

Hey H.D., come back, there’s trouble all over
Ruins, as you said, there, as here
I need your flowering vision, lady
Come with your angels and blank book
With your elegant cheekbones
Your loquent lines upswept white hair
Lyrical long fingers and dark wool cape
As I’m reading the news

Help us, we filled the oceans
With the plastic crap we like to buy 
Choked the sea-nymphs, let loose toxins into the sky
The land is parched, the poles are melting
My friends are canning food and buying guns
I have serious doubts, I have two children
You had one, Perdita, the Lost One
We live in the country and drank water
Poisoned by a chemical factory nearby
So people could eat microwave popcorn
And make omelets with nonstick pans
It’s not that bad, our blood levels are so-so
It’s my job to protect them, H.D.
From bullies traffickers warmongers
I will write down everything you say

When bombs fell around your family 
You seemed so sure in your poems
Walking down a London street
Thinking of Egypt of Mary of ruins
You stepped through a broken wall to see
A bomb-blackened apple tree flowering
It guided you through the Blitz
Here when cherry blossoms appear after the winter
I think, Pretty pink ladies
Don’t catch a disease and die on us

I remember the Two Towers falling
People pulverized into clouds of dust
We breathed in their particles
A sickly sweet smell smoldering for months
That week the skies bore a blue clarity
What can you teach me now?
I don’t think the petitions I’m signing are helping
Not religious have no husband need advice

Where to now, H.D.?
Come near, if you can bear it
I know, it’s not exactly here as there
We have made our own problems
Aloud I read your poems and there
You stand at the top of the stair
Holding your book, your cape falls over me
H.D., tell me what to do

“Come Back!" by Camille Guthrie from DIAMONDS © 2021 Camille Guthrie. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of BOA Editions.