A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012)
The pact that we made was the ordinary pact
of men & women in those days
I don’t know who we thought we were
that our personalities
could resist the failures of the race
Lucky or unlucky, we didn’t know
the race had failures of that order
and that we were going to share them
Like everybody else, we thought of ourselves as special
Your body is as vivid to me
as it ever was: even more
since my feeling for it is clearer:
I know what it could and could not do
it is no longer
the body of a god
or anything with power over my life
Next year it would have been 20 years
and you are wastefully dead
who might have made the leap
we talked, too late, of making
which I live now
not as a leap
but a succession of brief, amazing movements
each one making possible the next

A few random poems:
- Sonnet 114: Or whether doth my mind, being crowned with you by William Shakespeare
- A Clear Day And No Memories by Wallace Stevens
- Sonnet LXVI by William Shakespeare
- Reading Moby-Dick at 30,000 Feet by Tony Hoagland
- Forty Years Later by Martin Willitts, Jr
- Prayer—O Thou Dread Power by Robert Burns
- Олег Бундур – Всё живёт
- Who Knows? by Vachel Lindsay
- Илья Эренбург – О Москве
- “Wishing to float” by Seema Gupta
- Низами Гянджеви – Ради встречи с тобой я до края земли дошел
- Face To Face by Rabindranath Tagore
- With his venom by Sappho
- Ольга Берггольц – Марш оловянных солдатиков
- In My Own Shire, If I Was Sad poem – A. E. Housman
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
- Why England Is Conservative poem – Alfred Austin
- Who Would Not Die For England! poem – Alfred Austin
- “When the reaper lays the sickle by ” poem – Alfred Austin
- When Runnels Began To Leap And Sing poem – Alfred Austin
- ” When in the long–drawn avenues of Thought” poem – Alfred Austin
- “What ails you, Ocean, that nor near nor far” poem – Alfred Austin
- “`Were I a Poet, I would dwell” poem – Alfred Austin
- Since We Must Die poem – Alfred Austin
- Wardens Of The Wave poem – Alfred Austin
- To The Autumn Wind poem – Alfred Austin
- To Robert Louis Stevenson poem – Alfred Austin
- To Ireland poem – Alfred Austin
- To England poem – Alfred Austin
- To Ellen Terry poem – Alfred Austin
- To Beatrice Stuart–Wortley Ætat poem – Alfred Austin
- To Arms! poem – Alfred Austin
- To Arms! (II) poem – Alfred Austin
- To Alfred Tennyson poem – Alfred Austin
- “‘Tis because, though in dusky bower” poem – Alfred Austin
- Time’s Weariness poem – Alfred Austin
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.