Here’s a captivating excerpt from a longer piece by the great modernist poet H.D. (1886-1961).
from “The Flowering of the Rod”
[2]
I go where I love and where I am loved,
into the snow;
I go to the things I love
with no thought of duty or pity;
I go where I belong, inexorably,
as the rain that has lain long
in the furrow; I have given
or would have given
life to the grain;
but if it will not grow or ripen
with the rain of beauty,
the rain will return to the cloud;
the harvester sharpens his steel on the stone;
but this is not our field,
we have not sown this;
pitiless, pitiless, let us leave
The-place-of-a-skull
to those who have fashioned it.
live in the layers 