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:
- Vocation by Rabindranath Tagore
- Vivien
- Виктор Шамонин-Версенев – Заяц-врун
- Middle-Ages by Siegfried Sassoon
- Epitaph on a Lap-dog by Robert Burns
- Orlando Furioso canto 13 by Ludovico Ariosto
- Георгий Иванов – То, о чем искусство лжет
- Gloucester Moods by William Vaughn Moody
- The Song Of The Jellicles by T. S. Eliot
- Ольга Седакова – Цивилизация
- Robert Burns: Verses Written With A Pencil Over the Chimney-piece in the Parlour of the Inn at Kenmore, Taymouth.:
- Константин Бальмонт – Что достойно, что бесчестно
- Looking Across The Fields And Watching The Birds Fly by Wallace Stevens
- Shut Not Your Doors, &c. by Walt Whitman
- Crossing Brooklyn Ferry. by Walt Whitman
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
- Written In A Volume Of The Comtesse De Noailles
- Kyrenaikos
- With A Copy Of Shakespeares Sonnets On Leaving College
- Juvenilia An Ode To Natural Beauty
- Vivien
- I Loved
- Virginibus Puerisque
- I Have A Rendezvous With Death
- Translations Dante Inferno Canto Xxvi
- Fragments
- To England At The Outbreak Of The Balkan War
- Eudaemon
- Tithonus
- The Wanderer
- The Torture Of Cuauhtemoc
- The Sultans Palace
- The Rendezvous
- The Old Lowe House Staten Island
- The Nympholept
- The Need To Love
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.