A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012)
I am walking rapidly through striations of light and dark thrown under an arcade.
I am a woman in the prime of life, with certain powers
and those powers severely limited
by authorities whose faces I rarely see.
I am a woman in the prime of life
driving her dead poet in a black Rolls-Royce
through a landscape of twilight and thorns.
A woman with a certain mission
which if obeyed to the letter will leave her intact.
A woman with the nerves of a panther
a woman with contacts among Hell’s Angels
a woman feeling the fullness of her powers
at the precise moment when she must not use them
a woman sworn to lucidity
who sees through the mayhem, the smoky fires
of these underground streets
her dead poet learning to walk backward against the wind
on the wrong side of the mirror
A few random poems:
- Exiles by Marilyn Hacker
- Наум Коржавин – Ленинград
- The Falling Of The Leaves by William Butler Yeats
- Николай Заболоцкий – Ласточка
- Juvenilia An Ode To Natural Beauty
- “Look up, desponding hearts! See, Morning sallies” poem – Alfred Austin
- Even The Rain
- Berenda Slough by Philip Levine
- Evening by Olivia Lewis
- Владимир Орлов – Дядя Миша на печи
- Whitsun by Sylvia Plath
- Silence by Preeth Nambiar
- Николай Гумилев – Кармен худа, коричневатый
- The Beacon Fires
- Philip Levine – Philip Levine
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
- When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d. by Walt Whitman
- When I read the Book. by Walt Whitman
- When I peruse the Conquer’d Fame. by Walt Whitman
- When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer. by Walt Whitman
- When I heard at the Close of the Day. by Walt Whitman
- What think You I take my Pen in Hand? by Walt Whitman
- What Place is Besieged? by Walt Whitman
- What General has a Good Army. by Walt Whitman
- What Best I See In Thee. by Walt Whitman
- What am I, After All? by Walt Whitman
- We Two—How Long We were Fool’d. by Walt Whitman
- We Two Boys Together Clinging. by Walt Whitman
- Visor’d. by Walt Whitman
- Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field. by Walt Whitman
- Turn, O Libertad. by Walt Whitman
- To You. by Walt Whitman
- To Thee, Old Cause! by Walt Whitman
- To the Garden the World. by Walt Whitman
- To One Shortly to Die. by Walt Whitman
- To Him that was Crucified. by Walt Whitman
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.