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:
- An Adventure in the Life of King James V of Scotland by William Topaz McGonagall
- Sancta Maria, Succurre Miseris poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- The Day’s Work by Rudyard Kipling
- Robert Burns: Lady Onlie, Honest Lucky:
- Николай Карамзин – К Дмитриеву (Многие барды, лиру настроив)
- I Have A Rendezvous With Death
- On The Wedding Of The Aeronaut poem – Ambrose Bierce poems | Poems and Poetry
- absent-mindedness; or I Dream of Spices by Raj Arumugam
- From The ‘Antigone’ by William Butler Yeats
- To A Lady On The Death Of Her Husband by Phillis Wheatley
- Михаил Лермонтов – Арфа
- Новелла Матвеева – Подсолнух
- Валерий Брюсов – Из детской книжки
- In the Night poem – Amy Levy poems | Poems and Poetry
- The House Of Dreams by Sara Teasdale
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
- Ballade Of Roulette poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Ballade Of Queen Anne poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Ballade Of Old Plays poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Ballade Of Worldly Wealth poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Ballade Of True Wisdom poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Ballade Of The Voyage To Cythera poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Ballade Of The Tweed poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Ballade Of The Summer Term poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Ballade Of The Southern Cross poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Ballade Of The Royal Game Of Golf poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Ballade Of The Muse poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Ballade Of The Midnight Forest poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Ballade Of The Dream poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Ballade Of The Dead Cities poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Ballade Of The Bookworm poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Ballade Of Sleep poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Ballade Of Roulette poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Ballade Of Queen Anne poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Ballade Of Old Plays poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Ballade Of His Books poem – Andrew Lang poems
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.