I Am Ezra

It's Ezra Pound's birthday, one of my three favourite American poets (the others being Ammons and Stevens). And despite some very unsavoury aspects to his character (anti-Semitism, treasonous activities), he remains endlessly fascinating. We were introduced not through his poetry (so much later) but a novel by Timothy Findley, 'Famous Last Words'. And I'm not sure where I first read the following poem, but it stunned the feeble brainmeat of my appallingly callow younger self, and left me in thrall to the Imagists for at least a summer of my youth. 

Doria (transliteration of the Greek)

Be in me as the eternal moods

      of the bleak wind, and not

As transient things are–

      gaiety of flowers.

Have in me the strong loneliness

      of sunless cliffs

And of grey waters.

      Let the gods speak softly of us

In days hereafter.

      The shadowy flowers of Orcus

Remember thee.

Bonus poem:

So I Said I Am Ezra

So I said I am Ezra

and the wind whipped my throat

gaming for the sounds of my voice

  I listened to the wind

go over my head and up into the night

Turning to the sea I said

I am Ezra

but there were no echoes from the waves

The words were swallowed up

   in the voice of the surf

or leaping over the swells

lost themselves oceanward

   Over the bleached and broken fields

I moved my feet and turning from the wind

   that ripped sheets of sand

   from the beach and threw them

   like seamists across the dunes

swayed as if the wind were taking me away

and said

I am Ezra

As a word too much repeated

falls out of being

so I Ezra went out into the night

like a drift of sand

and splashed among the windy oats

that clutch the dunes

of unremembered seas

A.R. Ammons

'The Eternal' Joy Division