Odd choices
They built a brutalist monstrosity
On top of Hilda Doolittle’s house
I don’t know why they did that
Just couldn’t help themselves
I suppose
We can be careless that way with treasures
Always putting tomorrow
Ahead of yesterday
Today, her house is underneath City Hall but then
Aren’t we all?
What remains of Hilda lays
In an unassuming grave
I must assume
I searched but couldn’t find it among the obelisks
And laurels
A sign of healthy humility
Don’t you think?
Dear H.D. made it just a short distance up the street
In which she was born
(Via New York, London, Paris, Zurich)
Now her ashes are up on Nisky Hill
Seashells of appreciation placed on her headstone
Or, so, I’m told
In the end, the poet came home
To a place she’d long left behind
Nestled in the soil of memory
Looking down on old familiar views
O little town of Bethlehem.
She could see her house from there
If she weren’t in an urn
And they hadn’t built a brutalist monstrosity on top of it.
Words and images are my own.
©2019
Runaway American Dream 
Et tu, Brutalist? Brutalist, yes, the first thing I thought of when I saw that edifice. The actual architectural style of something they could only love behind what was once called the Iron Curtain. Anyway, nice poem.
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Cheers. It certainly has that Soviet feel. Reminds me a little too much of Canberra where I grew up.
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Boston city hall is Brutalist. Everybody fucking hates it and they finally have a plan to at least dress the area up a little more hospitably. You grew up in the capital? I didn’t know that. I’m on a project where I just spoke with a guy from there not a week ago.
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From Sydney originally but spent way too many years in Canberra. I hate the damned place.
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A guy I work with here told me he went to a place called Surfer’s Paradise and found it be something less than that. I’d never heard of it.
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it’s a tourist trap up in Queensland. It’s the sort of place where students ‘go wild’ for spring break (schoolies week as we call it).
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Hmm. That sounds like fun. Can older middle-aged guys go ‘wild’ too?
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I don’t think there’s a law against it yet.
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