Hello and welcome to the Daily Poem. I'm Heidi White, and today is Thursday, March 4th. And today I'm

going to read for you a poem by American Poet H.D. Those are her initials. Her name was Hilda

Doolittle. She was born in 1886 and lived until 1961. And for five decades of her life, she wrote poetry.

H.D. was part of the modernist school of poets in the 20th century.

She was included in the same kind of style as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot,

William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, William Butler Yates, and others. And she was known

for her fragmented style and her very strong, descriptive, and sensory words within her poems.

And I think you'll hear that in the poem I'm going to read today. She also was just a complex

person. Within her poetry, you find modernism. There's evidence of psychoanalysis, which was really, you know, all the rage in her lifetime. She was also a strong feminist and wrote a lot about the experience of being a woman in the modern age. So today's poem is called Sheltered Garden,

and this is how it goes. I've had enough. I gasp for breath. Every way ends, every road,

every footpath leads at last to the hillcrest.

Then you retrace your steps or find the same slope on the other side, precipitate.

I have had enough.

Border pinks, clove pinks, wax lilies, herbs, sweetcress, oh for some sharp swish of a branch. There is no scent of resin in this place,

no taste of bark, of coarse weeds, aromatic, astringent, only border on border of scented pinks.

Have you seen fruit under cover that wanted light? Pairs wadded in cloth, protected from the frost, melons, almost ripe, smothered in straw? Why not let the pears cling to the empty branch? All your coaxing will only make a bitter fruit. Let them cling, ripen of themselves, test their own worth, nipped, shriveled by the frost, to fall at last but fair with a russet coat.

Or the melon, let it bleach yellow in the winter light, even tart to the taste.

It is better to taste of frost, the exquisite frost, than of wadding, than of dead grass.

For this beauty, beauty without strength, chokes out life.

I want wind to break, scatter these pink stalks, snap off their

spiced heads, fling them about with dead leaves, spread the paths with twigs, limbs broken off,

trail great pine branches, hurled from some far off wood right across the melon patch, break, pear, and quince, leave half trees torn, twisted, but showing the fight was valiant. Oh, to blot out this garden, to forget, to find a new beauty in some terrible wind tortured place.

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