A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012)
Living in the earth-deposits of our history
Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate.
Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil
She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power.
A few random poems:
- Forget-me-nots by Vishü Rita Krocha
- Анатолий Жигулин – Деревья с черными грачами
- Epigram on Jessy Staig’s recovery by Robert Burns
- Федор Сологуб – Астероид
- To Her Beauty by Nithin Purple
- Not Goo Hwome To-Night by William Barnes
- Going by Philip Larkin
- the_children_look_at_the_parents.html
- Towards Break Of Day by William Butler Yeats
- The Fearful by Sylvia Plath
- Стефан Малларме – Появление
- Валерий Брюсов – Есть что-то позорное в мощи природы
- Владимир Высоцкий – Кто за чем бежит
- Ольга Седакова – Филемон и Бавкида
- Written In A Blank Leaf Of Macpherson’s Ossian by William Wordsworth
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
- The Deserted Garden
- The Bayadere
- The Aisne
- Tezcotzinco
- Sonnet Xvi Who Shall Invoke Her
- Sonnet Xv
- Sonnet Xiv
- Sonnet Xiii
- Sonnet Xii
- Sonnet Xi
- Sonnet X
- Sonnet Viii
- Sonnet Vii
- Sonnet Vi
- Sonnet V
- Sonnet Ix
- Sonnet Iv
- Sonnet Iii
- Sonnet Ii
- Sonnet I
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.