A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012)
A life hauls itself uphill
through hoar-mist steaming
the sun’s tongue licking
leaf upon leaf into stricken liquid
When? When? cry the soothseekers
but time is a bloodshot eye
seeing its last of beauty its own
foreclosure
a bloodshot mind
finding itself unspeakable
What is the last thought?
Now I will let you know?
or, Now I know?
(porridge of skull-splinters, brain tissue
mouth and throat membrane, cranial fluid)
Shattered head on the breast
of a wooded hill
Laid down there endlessly so
tendrils soaked into matted compose
became a root
torqued over the faint springhead
groin whence illegible
matter leaches: worm-borings, spurts of silt
volumes of sporic changes
hair long blown into far follicles
blasted into a chosen place
Revenge on the head (genitals, breast, untouched)
revenge on the mouth
packed with its inarticulate confessions
revenge on the eyes
green-gray and restless
revenge on the big and searching lips
the tender tongue
revenge on the sensual, on the nose the
carrier of history
revenge on the life devoured
in another incineration
You can walk by such a place, the earth is
made of them
where the stretched tissue of a field or woods
is humid
with beloved matter
the soothseekers have withdrawn
you feel no ghost, only a sporic chorus
when that place utters its worn sigh
let us have peace
And the shattered head answers back
And I believed I was loved, I believed I loved
Who did this to us?
A few random poems:
- Greek Light
- Robert Burns: A Mother’s Lament For the Death of Her Son.:
- The Sons of Martha by Rudyard Kipling
- Denouement Villanelle by Sylvia Plath
- Низами Гянджеви – Когда ее ароматом неслышно ветер повеет
- The Sound Of Your Breathing by Mac McGovern
- A Tale, Founded On A Fact, Which Happened In January, 1779 by William Cowper
- To Aphrodite by Sappho
- Please Don’t Judas Me by Mark Miller
- The Return of Persephone
- Юрий Галансков – Мне больно
- In The Stone I Rooted
- That Is by Satish Verma
- Владимир Солоухин – Вдоль берегов Болгарии прошли мы
- first_light.html
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
- Traveling Dream by Marge Piercy
- Toad Dreams by Marge Piercy
- To the Pay Toilet by Marge Piercy
- To Be of Use by Marge Piercy
- To a Steam Roller by Marianne Moore
- To an Intra-mural Rat by Marianne Moore
- The Woman in the Ordinary by Marge Piercy
- The Steeple-Jack by Marianne Moore
- The Seven Of Pentacles by Marge Piercy
- The Past is the Present by Marianne Moore
- The Paper Nautilus by Marianne Moore
- The Pangolin by Marianne Moore
- The Neighbor by Marge Piercy
- The Morning Half-Life Blues by Marge Piercy
- The Moment I knew my Life had Changed by Maria Mazziotti Gillan
- The Friend by Marge Piercy
- The Fish by Marianne Moore
- The Dark Cavalier by Margaret Widdemer
- The Colloquy Beneath by Margaret Marie Hubbard
- The Cat’s Song by Marge Piercy
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.