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:
- Devotion to Duty by Siegfried Sassoon
- Омар Хайям – Дай мне влаги хмельной, укрепляющей дух
- Владимир Костров – Утро в Заборье
- Waking at 3 a.m. by William Stafford
- Sonnet Ix
- Untitled by Quincy Troupe
- Ирина Гурина – Как пчёлы чуть не поссорились
- On A Drop Of Dew poem – Andrew Marvell poems
- Bring, In This Timeless Grave To Throw poem – A. E. Housman
- A winning lot
- I Would Live In Your Love by Sara Teasdale
- Николай Тихонов – Гулливер играет в карты
- Icicles round a Tree in Dumfriesshire by Ruth Padel
- A Patch of Old Snow by Robert Frost
- Clouds by Rupert Brooke
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
- On A Picture Of A Black Centaur By Edmund Dulac by William Butler Yeats
- Old Tom Again by William Butler Yeats
- Old Memory by William Butler Yeats
- Oil And Blood by William Butler Yeats
- O Do Not Love Too Long by William Butler Yeats
- Nineteen Hundred And Nineteen by William Butler Yeats
- News For The Delphic Oracle by William Butler Yeats
- Never Give All The Heart by William Butler Yeats
- Mohini Chatterjee by William Butler Yeats
- Model For The Laureate by William Butler Yeats
- Michael Robartes And The Dancer by William Butler Yeats
- Men Improve With The Years by William Butler Yeats
- Memory by William Butler Yeats
- Meeting by William Butler Yeats
- Meditations In Time Of Civil War by William Butler Yeats
- Byzantium by William Butler Yeats
- Blood And The Moon by William Butler Yeats
- Before The World Was Made by William Butler Yeats
- Beautiful Lofty Things by William Butler Yeats
- Baile And Aillinn by William Butler Yeats
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.