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:
- English Poetry. Katharine Tynan. A Woman Commends Her Little Son. Кэтрин Тайнен.
- Twelve Months After by Siegfried Sassoon
- The Blessed Virgin Compared To The Air We Breathe poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
- Spider by Sylvia Plath
- Like The Water by Wendell Berry
- Ольга Высотская стихи: лучшие стихотворения для детей Высотской – Poetry Monster
- Robert Burns: The Whistle -A Ballad:
- The Maharishi And The Baby
- Crush by Muhereza Louis
- Жан де Лафонтен – Эзопово объяснение одного завещания
- Psalm 04 poem – John Milton poems
- The Leaden Echo And The Golden Echo poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
- The Fascination Of What’s Difficult by William Butler Yeats
- Untitled V by Yunus Emre
- The Secrets Of Divine Love Are To Be Kept by William Cowper
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
- Infelix
- Hemlock Furrows
- Genius
- Fragment
- Dying
- Dreams Beauty
- Depths
- Battle Stars
- Aspiration
- Answer Me
- Adelina Patti
- The Nuclear Ghost Towns
- The Conditional
- The Ugly Little Bird
- Not A Star
- Mountain Wellhead
- Lightning In The Dark Night Skies
- In The Bus That Is Frantically Rushing From Cairo To Port Said
- Immoral Laboratories
- Hope
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.