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

Consider This And In Our Time 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)
Cocaine Lil and Morphine Sue by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
Christmas Oratio by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
Carry Her Over the Water by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
Canzone by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
Calypso by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
Base Words Are Uttered by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
Autumn Song by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
August 1968 by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
Atlantis by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
As I Walked Out One Evening by W. H. Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
As We Like It by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
As the poets have mournfully sung by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
Are You There? by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
After Reading a Child’s Guide to Modern Physics by W. H. Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
Academic Graffiti by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
A Walk After Dark by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
A New Year Greeting by W H Auden by Wystan Hugh Auden (W.H. Auden)
Continual Conversation With A Silent Man by Wallace Stevens by Wallace Stevens

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.