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:
- Владимир Высоцкий – Тот, кто раньше с нею был
- The Hands That Hang Down
- Ольга Берггольц – Не знаю, не знаю, живу
- Song Of The Master And Boatswain by W H Auden
- Robert Burns: The Soldier’s Return:
- Низами Гянджеви – В привычке сердца воровать ты
- Book First [Introduction-Childhood and School Time] by William Wordsworth
- Tears. by Walt Whitman
- A Passing Glimpse by Robert Frost
- Untitled XIII by Yunus Emre
- Kimchi
- Владимир Британишский – Есть добрая, есть и дурная слава
- Orlando Furioso Canto 17 by Ludovico Ariosto
- Sad-Eyed and Soft and Grey by William Morris
- The Human Tragedy ACT II poem – Alfred Austin
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
- Warm are the Still and Lucky Miles by W H Auden
- Voltaire At Ferney by W H Auden
- Underneath an Abject Willow by W H Auden
- This Lunar Beauty by W H Auden
- They Wondered Why the Fruit had Been Forbidden by W H Auden
- The Waters by W H Auden
- The Wanderer by W H Auden
- The Two by W H Auden
- The Riddle by W H Auden
- The Quest by W H Auden
- The Quest XII (Vocation) by W H Auden
- The Novelist by W H Auden
- The Labyrinth by W H Auden
- The Hidden Law by W H Auden
- The Geography of the House by W H Auden
- The Dream by W H Auden
- The Common Life by W H Auden
- Thanksgiving for a Habitat by W H Auden
- Taller To-day by W H Auden
- Song Of The Master And Boatswain by W H Auden
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.