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:
- Making The Lion For All It’s Got — A Ballad poem – Allen Ginsberg
- In The Chapel Of Rest by Steve Sant
- Interlude: Songs Out Of Sorrow by Sara Teasdale
- Толстой Алексей Николаевич стихи: Читать стихотворения Алексея Толстого – Список произведений, стихов поэта на Poetry Monster
- laugh to cry by Raj Arumugam
- boy_running_in_the_rain.html
- Иван Барков – Выбор
- Morning In The Hospital Solarium by Sylvia Plath
- The Legend Of Lady Gertrude
- To Youth by Robert Herrick
- Starting from Paumanok. by Walt Whitman
- 我被包围了
- Владимир Высоцкий – Тексты для капустника к 5-летию Театра на Таганке
- Sonnet CX by William Shakespeare
- A man saw a ball of gold in the sky by Stephen Crane
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
- A Terre by Wilfred Owen
- Arms And The Boy by Wilfred Owen
- Asleep by Wilfred Owen
- Exposure by Wilfred Owen
- Futility by Wilfred Owen
- Le Christianisme by Wilfred Owen
- An Imperial Elegy by Wilfred Owen
- But I Was Looking At The Permanent Stars by Wilfred Owen
- I Saw His Round Mouth’s Crimson by Wilfred Owen
- I know The Music (unfinished) by Wilfred Owen
- Hospital Barge At Cerisy by Wilfred Owen
- Has Your Soul Sipped? by Wilfred Owen
- Happiness by Wilfred Owen
- Greater Love by Wilfred Owen
- From My Diary, July 1914 by Wilfred Owen
- At A Calvary Near The Ancre by Wilfred Owen
- Apologia Pro Poemate Meo by Wilfred Owen
- Antaeus: [A Fragment] by Wilfred Owen
- A New Heaven (To-On Active Service) by Wilfred Owen
- 1914 by Wilfred Owen
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.