A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012)
This is the grass your feet are planted on.
You paint it orange or you sing it green,
But you have never found
A way to make the grass mean what you mean.
A cloud can be whatever you intend:
Ostrich or leaning tower or staring eye.
But you have never found
A cloud sufficient to express the sky.
Get out there with your splendid expertise;
Raymond who cuts the meadow does not less.
Inhuman nature says:
Inhuman patience is the true success.
Human impatience trips you as you run;
Stand still and you must lie.
It is the grass that cuts the mower down;
It is the cloud that swallows up the sky.
A few random poems:
- Аля Кудряшева – Тишина
- Вера Звягинцева – Стоишь, не поднимая глаз
- Олег Сердобольский – Алмазная снежинка
- Владимир Костров – Бедное сердце болит спозаранку
- Олег Бундур – Глухарь
- Proud Word You Never Spoke by Walter Savage Landor
- Priorities of Life and Death
- Илья Эренбург – Ода
- A Dish Of Peaches In Russia by Wallace Stevens
- Зинаида Александрова – Баиньки
- At Sea by Sara Teasdale
- Debt by Sara Teasdale
- Василий Жуковский – Гомер
- Гавриил Державин – На прогулку в грузинском саду
- Never Give All The Heart by William Butler Yeats
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
- first_light.html
- excerpt_from_the_quotgertrude_steinquot_collaborative_series.html
- eudaemonism_in_a_senryu_novel.html
- drunkenness.html
- do_not_get_angry.html
- dickinson_and_the_alabaster_gogyohka.html
- dawned_again.html
- create.html
- conference_swan_beauty.html
- colors_and_sounds.html
- children039s_eyes.html
- athens_stone_of_sapphire_of_ground_the_ring.html
- as_with_recitation_and_the_loss_of_a_kuhi.html
- antediluvian_kural_on_twitter.html
- alexander.html
- acts_of_love.html
- a_single_man.html
- a_poem.html
- a_dialogue.html
- a_city_one_wish.html
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.