Circles of Islands
on my last month's adventures, and H.D.'s Matrilineal Poetics
XI.
If you take the moon in your hands
and turn it round
(heavy, slightly tarnished platter)
you're there;
if you pull dry sea-weed from the sand
and turn it round
and wonder at the underside's bright amber,
your eyes
look out as they did here,
(you don't remember)
when my soul turned round,
perceiving the other-side of everything,
mullein-leaf, dog-wood leaf, moth-wing
and dandelion-seed under the ground.
- an excerpt from the poem "Dodona," by H.D., from her Uncollected and Unpublished Poems, written between 1912-1944
I have been on a circuitous journey this last moon. To my beloved Crete, after almost three years away, to my motherline England, and for a radiant May-blossomed moment, to Rhiannon’s Wales.
Over and over again on my travels, the image that has come to my mind is that of the fairytale grandmother handing a golden ball of wool to the seeker who has come—disheveled, breathless and full of longing— to her sylvan door. Throw this ball of wool out ahead of you, and follow where it leads. Do not doubt its path, though it will very likely not be straight. It will lead you to your heart’s desire. I have, in fact, been literally carrying a ball of wool with me, one I spun and dyed before leaving, and prayed over for this purpose. I don’t yet know where it’s leading me, but I am following it as truly as I can.
In Crete particularly, I was half-kneeling the whole way, touching every place I love there with my palms fully flat on the earth, understanding ever more deeply how love is my great mystery-path, my task-mistress, my initiator, and that the holy island from one end to the other is an alembic that always both terrifies me with its enormity and power, and yet brings me home to the essence of myself.
I have been studying the Greek language devotedly again, and found while I was there that my speaking and my understanding have become more fluent. A friend of mine showed me a fairytale book she had loved as a girl, and I was able to (mostly) translate a very simple tale about the Fates, which was thrilling not only because of the way the Greek language came alive under my eyes, but also because it happened to be an astonishingly relevant story for my Mother Animal book-research (forthcoming as a real-live hardback book, with a different title, in June 2026; full announcement details about my publisher etc. soon!) I spent time with a brilliant Minoan archaeologist in the mountains of Rethymno, talking for days about pre-historic midwifery cults (also for said book!). I gathered herbs for tea at dusk under moonlight, and drank them with strong honey when I subsequently got a fever.
And though that all sounds rather glorious, I cried almost every day from both happy emotion and overwhelm, one end of the island to the other, and felt very humbled: by how much I love Crete, by how fiercely I want to protect and honor her, by the way the relentless machines of extraction and capitalism continue to cause so much damage to her landscapes and people, and to all of our bodies and souls.
And yet, in pure defiance of existential despair, the sky was full of swallows—those precocious χελιδόνια of so many of my favorite Cretan and island love songs. Everywhere I went in Crete, their indigo wings swooped across my walking path, or in front of my car on mountain roads, like merciful and joyful blades to cut me loose from what has come before, so as to turn me toward what is here now, and what will be.
When I arrived in England, the swallows were here too, like a thread thrown across space and time. I have been marveling at this— how those tiny, crescent-light bodies crossed all of Europe, and the Libyan sea, and the mountains of north Africa, to fly also above the green fields here at the blossoming tail-end of May in Devon.
And I’ve been marveling at the way the light in different places changes them. In Crete, it was their iridescent indigo blue I noticed most, a blue verging on purple-black at times, almost electric in its iridescence under that fierce bright sun. Here in England, it is their cream underbellies I notice more, perhaps because they catch the white of the always shifting layers of clouds, perhaps because of the endless tides of hawthorn blossoms they seem to mirror, or the softer quality of the light which reflects creams better than indigos.
I have left threads from my guiding ball of wool for the swallows in Crete, and the swallows in England too, and as I contemplate them, and the places this thread leads me— back and forth and back and forth like one of those swallows— I think about how all of this journey, both this month and also these past seven years since my divorce, has been in service to the motherline, both my personal motherline, and also our collective reclamation of motherline stories, histories, and ways of being in this world. Crete who holds collective memories of the motherlines of Neolithic Europe; England who holds specific biological memories of my own.
On that note, I felt inspired today to share some of my more academic reflections on a poet whose work has been important to me on this journey, and also uncannily parallel. H.D.— Hilda Doolittle, an American poet born in Pennsylvania in 1886, who spent most of her adult life in England. H.D., who was an early star of the Imagist movement in the 1910’s with Ezra Pound in London. H.D. who wrote of pre-patriarchal Greek women, and womb-language, long before it was remotely a trend.
I first discovered her in a wonderful, extremely chaotic little used bookshop owned by an Englishman, around the corner from the house where I grew up. You never knew what you would find in David’s bookshop, because it was almost entirely out of order, but in spite of this— or perhaps because of it— I discovered two of my most formative and special female writers in there at around age 16. One of them was H.D., and though I wasn’t really ready for her poems at that age, I carried the little used copy of her selected poems around for years—another kind of thread— wanting to like it, wanting to get it, until finally, when I moved to Crete, it fell open in my hands and I began to read avidly. I understood only then that she knew the colors and scents and sounds and waters of Greece too, and that like me, long before me, she was calling out across the millennia for a matriline voice older than the voice of Zeus. Some of you will remember that in my book The Venus Year, one of the poems (Nautilus) is partly dedicated to her beautiful, imagistic style.
For part of my doctoral research at the University of Exeter (which is currently paused so I can finish my Mother Animal book set for publication in June of 2026), I began to take a deeper look at H.D.’s style and craft in her prose, particularly the way she used her own motherline, and the concept of these circling islands of feminine worlds and histories, as a poetic lens and tool.
I know that in my last post on the Bird-Goddess and Mother Goose, I promised an announcement about some exciting new storytelling plans and offerings I am cooking up right now for this fall— but they are not quite ready to reveal yet, so meanwhile, in their stead, I offer you a bit of my own literary criticism about H.D. and the motherline, below!