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:
- Magpiety by Philip Levine
- The Jungle Husband by Stevie Smith
- The battle of fire by Tanisha Avarsekar
- How to Increase Your Faith
- I Dream of my Grandmother and Great-Grandmother by Maria Mazziotti Gillan
- Shattered Head
- Sea Shell poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- Ольга Ермолаева – Напиши мне стишок
- Альфред Теннисон – Пересекая Черту
- The Touchstone by William Allingham
- Paris, Translation of Paul Verlaine’s poem: Paris by T. Wignesan.
- Владимир Солоухин – Волки
- A Wanderer by Siegfried Sassoon
- Олег Бундур – Вовка дразнит Свету
- Ballades IV – Of Life poem – Andrew Lang 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
- For What As Easy by W H Auden
- Five Songs – II by W H Auden
- Fish in the Unruffled Lakes by W H Auden
- Eyes Look Into The Well by W H Auden
- Eyes Look Into The Well by W H Auden
- Edward Lear by W H Auden
- Doggerel by a Senior Citizen by W H Auden
- Deftly, Admiral, Cast Your Fly by W H Auden
- Two Songs for Hedli Anderson by W. H. Auden
- The Shield of Achilles by W. H. Auden
- The More Loving One by W. H. Auden
- The Fall of Rome by W. H. Auden
- September 1, 1939 by W. H. Auden
- On the Circuit by W. H. Auden
- In Memory of W. B. Yeats by W. H. Auden
- In Memory of Sigmund Freud by W. H. Auden
- If I could tell you by W. H. Auden
- For Friends Only by W. H. Auden
- Epitaph on a Tyrant by W. H. Auden
- Death’s Echo 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.