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:
- A Hundred Years Hence by Rabindranath Tagore
- Ольга Ермолаева – Напиши мне стишок
- I Know an Aged Man Constrained to Dwell by William Wordsworth
- Владимир Британишский – Коптилки многолетний свет
- Sir Philip Sidney; Astrophel and Stella: XXIII by Sir Philip Sidney
- Владимир Британишский – Дождик
- Sohni and her love Mahinwal by Raj Arumugam
- Николай Языков – Элегия (Любовь, любовь! веселым днем)
- A Lover To His Mistress by William Strode
- The Song of the Cheerful (but slightly sarcastic) Jesus by Oliver St. John Gogarty
- Вера Павлова – Учась любовной науке
- Cousin Nancy by T. S. Eliot
- Ольга Берггольц – Борису Корнилову
- Robert Burns: Raging Fortune:
- Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms by Thomas Moore
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
- Как жаль, что много лет назад
- Как живёшь ветеран милиции
- Какая мама молодец
- Как хочу я в День влюбленных
- Как хорошо, что рядом верная подруга
- Как хорошо иметь подругу
- Как тяжело, когда идет война
- Как в поход я собираюсь
- Как воздух, математика нужна
- Как сегодня тихо в классе
- Как Снегурочка дела
- Как тамада я выступаю в роли теоретика
- Как привить ребенку любовь к чтению: советы и рекомендации – Poetry Monster
- Как просто было в юности
- Как прекрасны все цветы
- Ирина Гурина – Как пчёлы чуть не поссорились
- Ирина Гурина – Как появляются листочки
- Как прекрасно твое имя
- Как не бывает утро без рассвета
- Как небо сходится с водой
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.