Tomorrow evening at Matthew’s Chocolates in dazzling downtown Hillsborough, North Carolina, I’ll be hosting a Living Poetry event we’re calling Poetry Between the Lines and Truffles where my fellow living poets and I will discuss four poems by H.D. while enjoying chocolates and sweet red wine.

We’ve been doing Poetry Between the Lines for a year or more but this is the first time I’ve hosted and the first time we’ve done it in Orange County. It’s really just an excuse to indulge our collective sweet tooth but I still wanted to pick out an interesting poet to read. My criteria for the poet was that she not be a white male and be dead, so I started flipping through my anthologies looking for someone interesting and here’s the poem that caught my attention.

Stars wheel in purple, yours is not so rare
as Hesperus, nor yet so great a star
as bright Aldebaran or Sirius,
nor yet the stained and brilliant one of War;

stars turn in purple, glorious to the sight;
yours is not gracious as the Pleiads’ are
nor as Orion’s sapphires, luminous;

yet disenchanted, cold, imperious face,
when all the others, blighted, reel and fall,
your star, steel-set, keeps lone and frigid tryst.

Longtime readers will recognize immediately why I chose this poem, the astronomical images alone make it worthy of a close reading. Then I read a little about the poet and decided that she would be perfect for the event since she was known as avant-garde Imagist associated with Ezra Pound.

So, if you’re in the area, stop by Matthew’s Chocolates and have a chat about poetry. The truffles are on me.