A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012)
My swirling wants. Your frozen lips.
The grammar turned and attacked me.
Themes, written under duress.
Emptiness of the notations.
They gave me a drug that slowed the healing of wounds.
I want you to see this before I leave:
the experience of repetition as death
the failure of criticism to locate the pain
the poster in the bus that said:
my bleeding is under control
A red plant in a cemetary of plastic wreaths.
A last attempt: the language is a dialect called metaphor.
These images go unglossed: hair, glacier, flashlight.
When I think of a landscape I am thinking of a time.
When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
I could say: those mountains have a meaning
but further than that I could not say.
To do something very common, in my own way.

A few random poems:
- Before you go a little way prospecting by T. Wignesan
- every_hour_henceforth.html
- Elegy to the Old Man Hokuju by Yosa Buson
- Nevertheless by Marianne Moore
- Низами Гянджеви – Жить в заботе и невзгодах, расточая зло
- Lover’s Gifts LII: Tired of Waiting by Rabindranath Tagore
- Владимир Бенедиктов – Предостережение
- News, lassies, news (Song) by Robert Burns
- Epitaph by Samuel Coleridge
- Ольга Берггольц – Борису Корнилову
- Владимир Маяковский – Чехарда в палате… (РОСТА №881)
- A Reply by Wang Wei
- Niagara by Vachel Lindsay
- Sonnet to Italy by Felicia Dorothea Hemans
- O You by Satish Verma
External links
Bat’s Poetry Page – more poetry by Fledermaus
Talking Writing Monster’s Page –
Batty Writing – the bat’s idle chatter, thoughts, ideas and observations, all original, all fresh
Poems in English
- Phantasm
- Long I waited in vain
- was_then.html
- phantasm.html
- long_i_waited_in_vain.html
- Wind on the Hill by A. A. Milne
- Us Two by AA Milne
- twinkletoes.html
- The Morning Walk
- the_kings_breakfast.html
- the_dormouse_and_the_doctor.html
- the_christening.html
- Teddy Bear
- rice_pudding.html
- politeness.html
- Missing
- market_square.html
- lines_and_squares.html
- if_i_were_king.html
- hoppity.html
More external links (open in a new tab):
Doska or the Board – write anything
Search engines:
Yandex – the best search engine for searches in Russian (and the best overall image search engine, in any language, anywhere)
Qwant – the best search engine for searches in French, German as well as Romance and Germanic languages.
Ecosia – a search engine that supposedly… plants trees
Duckduckgo – the real alternative and a search engine that actually works. Without much censorship or partisan politics.
Yahoo– yes, it’s still around, amazingly, miraculously, incredibly, but now it seems to be powered by Bing.
Parallel Translations of Poetry
The Poetry Repository – an online library of poems, poetry, verse and poetic works
Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) was an American poet, essayist, and feminist.