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:
- Base Words Are Uttered by W H Auden
- At The Wedding March poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
- I Have A Rendezvous With Death
- The Princess (part 4) poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
- Street Circus poem – Aleksandr Blok poems | Poetry Monster
- Evening Star by William Blake
- The End of the Day poem – Amy Levy poems | Poems and Poetry
- A Dream Of Death by William Butler Yeats
- Children’s Games by William Carlos Williams
- Олег Бундур – Каменный берег
- Гавриил Державин – К первому соседу
- Labor Pains
- The Road by Siegfried Sassoon
- Lines Written In The Highlands After A Visit To Burns’s Country poem – John Keats poems
- Marine Snow At Mid-Depths And Down by Thomas Lux
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
- The Song Of The Kasak poem – Alexander Pushkin
- The Roussalka poem – Alexander Pushkin
- The Poet poem – Alexander Pushkin
- The Memorial poem – Alexander Pushkin
- The Last Flower poem – Alexander Pushkin
- The High Road In Winter poem – Alexander Pushkin
- The Duel poem – Alexander Pushkin
- The Delibash poem – Alexander Pushkin
- The Coming Of Winter poem – Alexander Pushkin
- The Coach Of Life poem – Alexander Pushkin
- The Caucas poem – Alexander Pushkin
- The Black Shawl poem – Alexander Pushkin
- The Bakchesarian Fountain poem – Alexander Pushkin
- Tempest poem – Alexander Pushkin
- Tatiana’s Letter poem – Alexander Pushkin
- Solitude poem – Alexander Pushkin
- Remembrance poem – Alexander Pushkin
- On Count Voronstov poem – Alexander Pushkin
- Old Man poem – Alexander Pushkin
- O Sing, Fair Lady, When With Me poem – Alexander Pushkin
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.