[There is no Life or Death,]

There is no Life or Death,
Only activity
And in the absolute
Is no declivity.
There is no Love or Lust
Only propensity
Who would possess
Is a nonentity.
There is no First or Last
Only equality
And who would rule
Joins the majority.
There is no Space or Time
Only intensity,
And tame things
Have no immensity.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on December 2, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“[There is no Life or Death]” appears in Camera Work, no. 46 (1914). In Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), biographer and critic Carolyn Burke writes, “Mabel [Dodge Luhan] thought well enough of one of Mina’s poems [. . .] to send it to Alfred Stieglitz for Camera Work: the colloquial tone and compression of ‘There is no Life or Death’ gave it an urgency that Mabel admired. Trying to impose her new perspective onto an older form, Mina had scraped it clean of sentiment. The result, something like a crossing of Emily Dickinson’s spatial sense with [Filippo Tommaso] Marinetti’s immediacy, might have been punctuated by Gertrude Stein [. . .].”