Wash of Cold River by Hilda Doolittle

Wash of Cold River

Wash of cold river
in a glacial land,
Ionian water,
chill, snow-ribbed sand,
drift of rare flowers,
clear, with delicate shell-
like leaf enclosing
frozen lily-leaf,
camellia texture,
colder than a rose;

wind-flower
that keeps the breath
of the north-wind —
these and none other;

intimate thoughts and kind
reach out to share
the treasure of my mind,
intimate hands and dear
drawn garden-ward and sea-ward
all the sheer rapture
that I would take
to mould a clear
and frigid statue;

rare, of pure texture,
beautiful space and line,
marble to grace
your inaccessible shrine

Hilda Doolittle
Born: 10 September 1886, Pennsylvania, USA
Nationality: American
Died: 27 September 1961, Zurich, Switzerland

Doolittle was a novelist, poet, and memoirist associated with the early 20th-century avant-garde imagist poets, including Richard Aldington and Ezra Pound. Doolittle published under the pen name H.D. She grew up just outside Philadelphia, moving to London in 1911. Married once, Doolittle had several relationships with both men and women and unapologetic about her sexuality became an icon for both the LGBT and feminist movements when her poems , plays and essays reappeared in the 1970s and 1980s