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:
- Федор Сологуб – В камине пылания много
- The Hecatomb to his Mistress by John Cleveland
- Robert Burns: On Scaring Some Water-Fowl In Loch-Turit : A wild scene among the Hills of Oughtertyre.
- The Municipal Gallery Revisited by William Butler Yeats
- To Sayf Al Dawla
- The Shield of Achilles by W. H. Auden
- Church Going by Philip Larkin
- Timothy Thomas Fortune – Timothy Thomas Fortune
- The Echo by William Barnes
- Омар Хайям – Кумир мой, вылепил тебя таким гончар
- Sonnet 126: O thou, my lovely boy, who in thy power by William Shakespeare
- Robert Burns: The Deil’s Awa Wi’ The Exciseman:
- Yoga and Love – Part I
- Bill ‘Awkins by Rudyard Kipling
- Олег Сердобольский – Два кораблика
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
- In A Restaurant by Sara Teasdale
- In A Railroad Station by Sara Teasdale
- In A Garden by Sara Teasdale
- In A Cuban Garden by Sara Teasdale
- “If I Must Go” by Sara Teasdale
- I Would Live In Your Love by Sara Teasdale
- “I Know The Stars” by Sara Teasdale
- Helen Of Troy by Sara Teasdale
- Grandfather’s Love by Sara Teasdale
- In A Garden by Sara Teasdale
- Galahad In The Castle Of The Maidens by Sara Teasdale
- From The Woolworth Tower by Sara Teasdale
- From The North by Sara Teasdale
- For The Anniversary Of John Keats’ Death by Sara Teasdale
- Eight O’Clock by Sara Teasdale
- Effigy Of A Nun by Sara Teasdale
- Dusk In War Time by Sara Teasdale
- Dusk In June by Sara Teasdale
- Dusk In Autumn by Sara Teasdale
- Deep In The Night 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.