Valediction Forbidding Mourning

A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012)

My swirling wants. Your frozen lips.

The grammar turned and attacked me.

Themes, written under duress.

Emptiness of the notations.

They gave me a drug that slowed the healing of wounds.

I want you to see this before I leave:

the experience of repetition as death

the failure of criticism to locate the pain

the poster in the bus that said:

my bleeding is under control

A red plant in a cemetary of plastic wreaths.

A last attempt: the language is a dialect called metaphor.

These images go unglossed: hair, glacier, flashlight.

When I think of a landscape I am thinking of a time.

When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.

I could say: those mountains have a meaning

but further than that I could not say.

To do something very common, in my own way.

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Poems in English 

• Unlyric Love Song by Arthur Seymour John Tessimond
• Tube Station by Arthur Seymour John Tessimond
• To Be Blind by Arthur Seymour John Tessimond
• The Man In The Bowler Hat by Arthur Seymour John Tessimond
• the_children_look_at_the_parents.html by Arthur Seymour John Tessimond
• The British by Arthur Seymour John Tessimond
• symphony_in_red.html by Arthur Seymour John Tessimond
• seaport.html by Arthur Seymour John Tessimond
• sea.html by Arthur Seymour John Tessimond
• quickstep.html by Arthur Seymour John Tessimond
• polyphony_in_a_cathedral.html by Arthur Seymour John Tessimond
• one_almost_might.html by Arthur Seymour John Tessimond
• nursery_rhyme_for_a_twenty_first_birthday.html by Arthur Seymour John Tessimond
• not_love_perhaps.html by Arthur Seymour John Tessimond
• night_piece.html by Arthur Seymour John Tessimond
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• meeting.html by Arthur Seymour John Tessimond
• last_word_to_childhood.html by Arthur Seymour John Tessimond
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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.

 

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