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 Keys of Morning by Walter de la Mare
- Robert Burns: Twas Na Her Bonie Blue E’e:
- To A Young Lady Who Had Been Reproached For Taking Long Walks In The Country by William Wordsworth
- When I Watch the Living Meet poem – Alfred Edward Housman
- Nocturnal Vigils poem – Alfred Austin
- Street Circus poem – Aleksandr Blok poems | Poetry Monster
- Эмиль Верхарн – Занавески
- Upper Lambourne poem – John Betjeman poems
- I don’t want to have you by Vinko Kalinic
- The Bowling-Green by William Somervile
- Paper Boats by Rabindranath Tagore
- Come After Jinny by Shel Silverstein
- We Two Boys Together Clinging. by Walt Whitman
- A Coloured Print by Shokei poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- Sonnet # 18 by Luis A. Estable
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
- Central Park At Dusk by Sara Teasdale
- At Sea by Sara Teasdale
- At Night by Sara Teasdale
- Alchemy by Sara Teasdale
- Advice To A Girl by Sara Teasdale
- A Winter Night by Sara Teasdale
- A Winter Bluejay by Sara Teasdale
- A Song Of The Princess by Sara Teasdale
- A Prayer by Sara Teasdale
- A Minuet Of Mozart’s by Sara Teasdale
- A Maiden by Sara Teasdale
- A Little While by Sara Teasdale
- A Fantasy by Sara Teasdale
- A Boy by Sara Teasdale
- A Ballad Of The Two Knights by Sara Teasdale
- Tides by Sara Teasdale
- The Years by Sara Teasdale
- The Mystery by Sara Teasdale
- The Ghost by Sara Teasdale
- The Fountain 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.