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the soothseekers have withdrawn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:
- Psalm 9 by Mahmoud Darwish
- The Living Lost by William Cullen Bryant
- Sonnet IV: Unthrifty Loveliness, Why Dost Thou Spend by William Shakespeare
- every_hour_henceforth.html
- Malmaison poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- Written In March by William Wordsworth
- My Mother by Claude McKay
- Duns Scotus’s Oxford poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
- Reviewing When We Were Slugs!
- Ape And Coffee by Russell Edson
- The Portrait by Siegfried Sassoon
- The Lesson by Roger McGough
- Hellcat
- Lines to John M’Murdo of Drumlanrig by Robert Burns
- To A Picture Of Eleanor Duse by Sara Teasdale
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
- Untitled XIX by Yunus Emre
- Untitled XIV by Yunus Emre
- Untitled XIII by Yunus Emre
- Untitled XII by Yunus Emre
- Untitled XI by Yunus Emre
- Untitled X by Yunus Emre
- Untitled VIII by Yunus Emre
- Untitled VII by Yunus Emre
- Untitled V by Yunus Emre
- Untitled IX by Yunus Emre
- Untitled IV by Yunus Emre
- Untitled III by Yunus Emre
- Untitled II by Yunus Emre
- Untitled I by Yunus Emre
- Love Compared To A Game Of Tables by William Strode
- Keepe On Your Maske (Version for his Mistress) by William Strode
- Keepe On Your Maske And Hide Your Eye by William Strode
- Justification by William Strode
- Jacke-On-Both-Sides by William Strode
- William Strode – William Strode
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.