A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012)
When the ice starts to shiver
all across the reflecting basin
or water-lily leaves
dissect a simple surface
the word ‘drowning’ flows through me.
You built a glassy floor
that held me
as I leaned to fish for old
hooks and toothed tin cans,
stems lashing out like ties of
silk dressing-gowns
archangels of lake-light
gripped in mud.
Now you hand me a torn letter.
On my knees, in the ashes, I could never
fit these ripped-up flakes together.
In the taxi I am still piecing
what syllables I can
translating at top speed like a thinking machine
that types out ‘useless’ as ‘monster’
and ‘history’ as ‘lampshade’.
Crossing the bridge I need all my nerve
to trust to the man-made cables.
The blades on that machine
could cut you to ribbons
but its function is humane.
Is this all I can say of these
delicate books, scythe-curved intentions
you and I handle? I’d rather
taste blood, yours or mine, flowing
from a sudden slash, than cut all day
with blunt scissors on dotted lines
like the teacher told.
A few random poems:
- come, sun rays by Raj Arumugam
- Russia To The Pacifists by Rudyard Kipling
- Гавриил Державин – Анакреон у печки
- It is raining! by Preeth Nambiar
- Ольга Седакова – Всё, и сразу
- Marriage Thoughts By Morsellin Khan
- Development of Indian English Poetry
- Veronica’s Napkin by William Butler Yeats
- To Somebody Out There by Vashti Trisawati Abhidana
- The Scissors-Grinder by Vachel Lindsay
- Do You Know What Its Like
- The Encounter poem – Ezra Pound poems
- Омар Хайям – Никто не лицезрел ни рая, ни геенны
- To a Steam Roller by Marianne Moore
- Robert Burns: Nature’s Law – A Poem: Humbly inscribed to Gavin Hamilton, Esq.
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
- Innocence
- In The Stone I Rooted
- In Between The Strophes
- Human Joys
- Human Charms
- He Who Creates Re Creates Himself
- Hai Kou Unpublished
- Hai Kou
- Greek Light
- Greece
- Golden Eangle
- Gesture Theory A Villanelle
- Gem Immortality
- Fruit Leaf Roots Flowers
- First Verse
- First Light
- Excerpt From The Gertrude Stein Collaborative Series
- Eudaemonism In A Senryu Novel
- Drunkenness
- Do Not Get Angry
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.