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:
- Robert Burns: On Andrew Turner:
- Robert Burns: Extemporaneous Effusion: On being appointed to an Excise division.
- Work in Game Design Rather Than Other Design
- The Fall by William Barnes
- Олег Григорьев – Увязался М. за Ж.
- Robert Burns: My Father Was A Farmer:
- The Furl of Fresh-Leaved Dogrose Down poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
- Totem by Sylvia Plath
- To Dorothy by Marvin Bell
- Cinderella by Roald Dahl
- Revelation poem – Aldous Huxley poems | Poetry Monster
- Halloween by Mac Hammond
- The Star by Sara Teasdale
- Николай Глазков – Что ни год, идёт вперёд
- A Valediction Forbidding Mourning
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
- Гавриил Державин – Философы, пьяный и трезвый
- Гавриил Державин – Амур и Психея
- Гавриил Державин – Жуковскому и Родзянке, приславшим с большими похвалами автору перевод его оды «Бог» на французском языке
- Гавриил Державин – Желание в горняя
- Гавриил Державин – Жан Расин. Рассказ Терамена
- Гавриил Державин – Задумчивость
- Гавриил Державин – Храповицкому (Храповицкий! дружбы знаки)
- Гавриил Державин – Похвала за правосудие
- Гавриил Державин – Похвала комару
- Гавриил Державин – Послание Мурзы Багрима к царевне Доброславе
- Гавриил Державин – Поминки
- Гавриил Державин – Покаяние
- Гавриил Державин – Подражание псалму (Терпел я, уповал на Бога)
- Гавриил Державин – Песенка
- Гавриил Державин – Пчелка
- Гавриил Державин – Охотник
- Гавриил Державин – Осень
- Гавриил Державин – Оковы
- Гавриил Державин – О удовольствии
- Гавриил Державин – Надежда на бога
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.