A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012)
Thinking of Caroline Herschel (1750-1848),
astronomer, sister of William; and others.
A woman in the shape of a monster
a monster in the shape of a woman
the skies are full of them
a woman ‘in the snow
among the Clocks and instruments
or measuring the ground with poles’
in her 98 years to discover
8 comets
She whom the moon ruled
like us
levitating into the night sky
riding the polished lenses
Galaxies of women, there
doing penance for impetuousness
ribs chilled
in those spaces of the mind
An eye,
‘virile, precise and absolutely certain’
from the mad webs of Uranusborg
encountering the NOVA
every impulse of light exploding
from the core
as life flies out of us
Tycho whispering at last
‘Let me not seem to have lived in vain’
What we see, we see
and seeing is changing
the light that shrivels a mountain
and leaves a man alive
Heartbeat of the pulsar
heart sweating through my body
The radio impulse
pouring in from Taurus
I am bombarded yet I stand
I have been standing all my life in the
direct path of a battery of signals
the most accurately transmitted most
untranslatable language in the universe
I am a galactic cloud so deep so invo-
luted that a light wave could take 15
years to travel through me And has
taken I am an instrument in the shape
of a woman trying to translate pulsations
into images for the relief of the body
and the reconstruction of the mind.
A few random poems:
- The Dream by Siegfried Sassoon
- Making It Work by Philip Levine
- Ballad Of The Press-Gang At Shihao Village by Du Fu
- Bag-Snatching In Dublin by Stevie Smith
- A Cradle Song by William Butler Yeats
- On a Scotch Bard, gone to the West Indies by Robert Burns
- Red Planet Haiku by Thomas J Camp
- Владимир Гиляровский – Чем дальше в море
- Perseus by Robert Hayden
- Sonnet 142: Love is my sin, and thy dear virtue hate by William Shakespeare
- Manhattan Streets I Saunter’d, Pondering. by Walt Whitman
- While Summer Suns O’er the Gay Prospect Play’d by Thomas Warton
- Who Knows? by Vachel Lindsay
- Dryads by Siegfried Sassoon
- Nature that Washed Her Hands in Milk by Sir Walter Raleigh
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
- Dews of Silence by Raju Baruah
- Catching the Rain by Raj Napal
- Blame by Raj Napal
- Better Be by Raj Napal
- Be Prepared by Raj Napal
- An empty photo album by Raj Napal
- Your Dog Dies by Raymond Carver
- Written Manna by Rangam Chiru
- What The Doctor Said by Raymond Carver
- Tyburn by Ramesh Anand
- The Scratch by Raymond Carver
- The Passing Cloud by Rashmi Sreekumar
- The Mountain Crumbles by Rashmi
- The Moon’s Truth (before the war) by Reena Ribalow
- The Heart Chirps by Ramesh Anand
- The Current by Raymond Carver
- The Cobweb by Raymond Carver
- The Best Time Of The Day by Raymond Carver
- Stupid by Raymond Carver
- Still Life by Reena Ribalow
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.