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June 26, 2022

The Pool

Bryher

You mirage a dead world
in the white pool.

White rush and silver rush at twitterlight
meet and desire as the shy boy
lifts from his lover.
White rush and silver rush at twitterlight
touch in the wind and sleep.

Duck-green and willow-silver…
has no wing touched your cheek?
Is there no bird
to weave a nest between your sullen limbs
and hatch a songster,
(amber with lizard eyes)
to chirp above your phrases: “Love, love, love…”

Your world dies from the surface of the pool.

Why are your hands not on the willow leaves
to feel the sharpness and the thin, soft flower?
To feel…
love wrinkle at the touch like a soft bird?

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on June 26, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“The Pool” appeared in Arrow Music (J. & E. Bumpus, 1922).

Winifred Bryher, born in Margate, England on September 2, 1894, was a poet, novelist, and memoirist. The author of many books, including Visa for Avalon (Harcourt Brace, 1965), she was a lifelong partner of the poet H.D., to whom she once wrote in a 1919 letter “...I am quite justified in pleading I ought to be a boy—I am just a girl by accident.” She died on January 28, 1983.

“The Pool” by H. D.
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“Mime X” by Marcel Schwob
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Thanks to Jos Charles, author of feeld (Milkweed Editions, 2018), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Read or listen to a Q&A about Charles’s curatorial approach and find out more about our guest editors for the year.

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Poem-a-Day - "The Pool" by Bryher

The Pool

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