A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012)
When the ice starts to shiver
all across the reflecting basin
or water-lily leaves
dissect a simple surface
the word ‘drowning’ flows through me.
You built a glassy floor
that held me
as I leaned to fish for old
hooks and toothed tin cans,
stems lashing out like ties of
silk dressing-gowns
archangels of lake-light
gripped in mud.
Now you hand me a torn letter.
On my knees, in the ashes, I could never
fit these ripped-up flakes together.
In the taxi I am still piecing
what syllables I can
translating at top speed like a thinking machine
that types out ‘useless’ as ‘monster’
and ‘history’ as ‘lampshade’.
Crossing the bridge I need all my nerve
to trust to the man-made cables.
The blades on that machine
could cut you to ribbons
but its function is humane.
Is this all I can say of these
delicate books, scythe-curved intentions
you and I handle? I’d rather
taste blood, yours or mine, flowing
from a sudden slash, than cut all day
with blunt scissors on dotted lines
like the teacher told.
A few random poems:
- Among the Multitude. by Walt Whitman
- Honor Among Scamps by Vachel Lindsay
- The Gardener XIX: You Walked by Rabindranath Tagore
- Sonnet 16 poem – John Milton poems
- The Swamp Fox by William Gilmore Simms
- The Gardener XXII: When She Passed by Me by Rabindranath Tagore
- On Calais Sands poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Gigolo by Sylvia Plath
- The Seven Sisters by William Wordsworth
- by_an_evolutionist.html
- Федор Сологуб – Займитесь чтением в вагоне
- Let Him In by Vishnu J Mohan
- I threaded a garland with the memories of a spring… by Preeth Nambiar
- Again And Again, However We Know The Landscape Of Love by Rainer Maria Rilke
- Canadian Winter by Mike Yuan
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
- La Nue
- Kyrenaikos
- Juvenilia An Ode To Natural Beauty
- I Loved
- I Have A Rendezvous With Death
- Fragments
- Eudaemon
- El Extraviado
- Do You Remember Once
- Coucy
- Champagne 1914 15
- Broceliande
- Bellinglise
- At The Tomb Of Napoleon
- Ariosto Orlando Furioso Canto X 91 99
- Antinous
- An Ode To Antares
- All Thats Not Love
- After An Epigram Of Clement Marot
- A Message To America
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.