A Cento of Early Ezra: No Whisper Speak

Bade No Whisper Speak the Birds

I stood still and was a tree amid the wood,
For I was a gaunt, grave councilor,
I did not like to remember things any more.

I have curled mid the boles of the ash wood
Strange spells of old deity, ravens,
Ivy fingers clutching through the crevices

Lest blasphemy be writ against my name;
Wistful for my kin and none about me
Save in shadows that come mewards

Flesh-shrouded, bearing secrets. All that
With strange sadness, hold the earth
In mockery, and are kind, with seas between us

Call the utmost singing, torn, green, silent
Bade no whisper speak the birds.

According to Wikipedia:

The Latin term cento derives from Greek κέντρων (gen. κέντρωνος), meaning “‘to plant slips’ (of trees)”. A later word in Greek, κέντρόνη, means “patchwork garment”. According to Hugh Gerard Evelyn-White, “A cento is therefore a poem composed of odd fragments”.

Last week I picked out from the “poetry month” doorside display at my local library Ezra Pound: New Selected Poems and Translations (New in 2010). As I was reading some of Pound’s earliest poems from A Lume Spento,  the muse’s scalpel began to twitch in the big left hand of the cortical homunculus, slicing and dicing, pushing collops of cruelest April (crueler than Eliot) into collage, a cruller twisting of cakey Pound. There is conflict between past and present tenses in the stitched phrases that I can’t resolve, so I let it stand until it’s stood.