Lay for the Day30th October

1885: Ezra Weston Loomis Pound is born in Hailey, Idaho.

From the book of Praises:

1. Of Ezra Pound

Who wrought to overturn the world’s
disorder, overturned himself,
wounded and was wounded;
fought with bitterness the death
injected in the tongue,
whose tongue became poisonous;

Whose acrid, jittery early works
are not inaccurate darts,
whose Jesus was the knotter of a scourge;
who was a Provençal Confucian from Idaho,
a Jew-baiting Jeremiah
and Jonah watching tendrils from his booth of wire;

Who outlived “an old man’s frenzy”
and ended like his Paradiso,
stone-like – that is, glinting and unyielding,
clear-cut, elevated, wordless;
who saw the crystal sea
and Hell in the minds of men.

John Gibbens
from Collected Poems

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