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:
- Li Po drowns by Raj Arumugam
- Юлия Друнина – Бежала от морозов, вот беда
- Before the Altar poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- Василий Жуковский – Деревенский сторож в полночь
- Sonnet 3: Look in thy glass, and tell the face thou viewest by William Shakespeare
- Наум Коржавин – Наверно, я не так на свете жил
- Jazz by Roland Bastien
- An Address to the Rev. George Gilfillan by William Topaz McGonagall
- Pied Beauty by Ted Hughes
- XIV: Some Verses: To Mr. Edward Allane by William Alexander
- Robert Burns: Elegy On “Stella”: The following poem is the work of some hapless son of the Muses who deserved a better fate. There is a great deal of “The voice of Cona” in his solitary, mournful notes; and had the sentiments been clothed in Shenstone’s language, they would have been no discredit even to that elegant poet.-R.B.
- Among the Rocks by Robert Browning
- Orlando Furioso Canto 21 by Ludovico Ariosto
- Mark The Concentrated Hazels That Enclose by William Wordsworth
- Quies poem – Ezra Pound poems
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
- The Poor House by Sara Teasdale
- The Old Maid by Sara Teasdale
- The Nights Remember by Sara Teasdale
- The New Moon by Sara Teasdale
- The Net by Sara Teasdale
- The Mother Of A Poet by Sara Teasdale
- The Metropolitan Tower by Sara Teasdale
- The Meeting by Sara Teasdale
- The Love That Goes A-Begging by Sara Teasdale
- The Look by Sara Teasdale
- The Long Hill by Sara Teasdale
- The Lights Of New York by Sara Teasdale
- The Lighted Window by Sara Teasdale
- The Lamp by Sara Teasdale
- The Kiss by Sara Teasdale
- The Kind Moon by Sara Teasdale
- The Inn Of Earth by Sara Teasdale
- The India Wharf by Sara Teasdale
- The House Of Dreams by Sara Teasdale
- The Heart’s House by Sara Teasdale
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.