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:
- On The Decline Of Oracles by Sylvia Plath
- Look You, I’ll Go Pray by Vachel Lindsay
- Lying on a Slab by Satish Verma
- Robert Burns: Damon And Sylvia: Fragment
- Владимир Маяковский – Смотри, чтоб праздник перешел и в будни
- Шекспир – Дыханье мысли и огонь желанья – Сонет 45
- St Patrick’s Day by Michael McGovern
- The Riddle of the World poem – Alexander Pope
- Verses On A Young Lady (playing harpsichord, and singing) by Tobias Smollett
- Катя Пиксаева – Давай поговорим о доброте
- The Unpromised Land, Montgomery, Alabama poem – Andrew Hudgins poems | Poems and Poetry
- Низами Гянджеви – День мой благословен
- Asleep! O Sleep A Little While, White Pearl! poem – John Keats poems
- I met a seer by Stephen Crane
- Purity by Rabindranath Tagore
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 Palace
- Storm
- Poor Fisherman
- Invitation
- A Banquet Song
- Written In A Volume Of The Comtesse De Noailles
- With A Copy Of Shakespeares Sonnets On Leaving College
- Vivien
- Virginibus Puerisque
- Translations Dante Inferno Canto Xxvi
- To England At The Outbreak Of The Balkan War
- Tithonus
- The Wanderer
- The Torture Of Cuauhtemoc
- The Sultans Palace
- The Rendezvous
- The Old Lowe House Staten Island
- The Nympholept
- The Need To Love
- The Hosts
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.