Adolf Wolf - Immortality (1913)
Forgotten Poems #19
—: Immortality :—
At dawn of day the stars die one by one.
They only seem to die, but do not die.
There is no death for humans, or for stars.
What we call life and death is only rhythm.
It is all cadence, measure, rest, inflection,
The poetry, the music of the spheres.
The universe is one stupendous poem
Whereof the suns and stars are words and letters,
And we frail humans, punctuation marks.
Adolf Wolf (p. 1916-1919, etc)
P: Others (1916), The Little Review (1917), TNT (1919); C: Songs, Sighs, & Curses (1913), Songs of Rebellion, Songs of Life, Songs of Love (1914), etc.
Poet and sculptor; lived in New York. Co-edited the Dada publication TNT (1919), with Man Ray and Mitchell Dawson.
Was active in Marxist and Communist circles. Wrote the 1928 script for “what was called a Mass Revolutionary Pageant” performed by “a cast of 1000 workers directed by Edward Massey of the New Playwrights' Theatre” with music by the New York Philharmonic Society, and a “200-voice chorus from the Singing Society of Freiheit, the Yiddish Communist daily newspaper.” (Ellen Graff, Stepping Left: Dance & Politics in NYC, 1997)
For Adolf Wolff by Dick Whyte it’s all songs— mountains, valleys, plains— a leaf with more than two sides, a worm writhing in the sun almost dead— the tide goes in & out & the sand is a song too it’s all songs— or none of it is i know which i prefer
Forgotten Poets Presents:
Forgotten Poems, a free living anthology of obscure and out-of-print poetry from the late-1800s and early-1900s. Explore the archives:
