From A Survivor

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:

External links

Bat’s Poetry Page – more poetry by Fledermaus

Batty Writing – the bat’s idle chatter, thoughts, ideas and observations, all original, all fresh

Warm are the Still and Lucky Miles by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
Voltaire At Ferney by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
Underneath an Abject Willow by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
This Lunar Beauty by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
They Wondered Why the Fruit had Been Forbidden by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
The Waters by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
The Wanderer by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
The Two by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
The Riddle by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
The Quest by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
The Quest XII (Vocation) by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
The Novelist by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
The Labyrinth by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
The Hidden Law by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
The Geography of the House by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
The Dream by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
The Common Life by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
Thanksgiving for a Habitat by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
Taller To-day by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
Song Of The Master And Boatswain by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)

More external links (open in a new tab):

Doska or the Board – write anything

Search engines:

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.

Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) was an American poet, essayist, and feminist.