The dream of a common language – Adrienne Rich

POWER

Living in the earth-deposits of our history

Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for ever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and supporting skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil

She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power

1974

PHANTASIA FOR ELVIRA SHATAYEV*

The cold felt cold until our blood
grew colder then the wind
died down and we slept

If in this sleep I speak
it’s with a voice no longer personal
(I want to say with voices)
When the wind tore our breath from us at last
we had no need of words
For months for years each one of us
had felt her own yes growing in her
slowly forming as she stood at windows waited
for trains mended her rucksack combed her hair
What we were to learn was simply what we had
up here as out of all words that yes gathered
its forces fused itself and only just in time
to meet a No of no degrees
the black hole sucking the world in

I feel you climbing toward me
your cleated bootsoles leaving their geometric bite
colossally embossed on microscopic crystals
as when I trailed you in the Caucasus

* Leader of a women’s climbing team, all of whom died in a storm on Lenin Peak, August 1974. Later, Shatayev’s husband found and buried the bodies.

HUNGER
(For Audre Lorde)

4.
The decision to feed the world
is the real decision. No revolution
has chosen it. For that choice requires
that women shall be free.
I choke on the taste of bread in North America
but the taste of hunger in North America
is poisoning me. Yes, I’m alive to write these words,
to leaf through Kollwitz’s women
huddling the stricken children into their stricken arms
the «mothers» drained of milk, the «survivors» driven
to self-abortion, self-starvation, to a vision
bitter, concrete, and wordless.
I’m alive to want more than life,
want it for others starving and unborn,
to name the deprivations boring
into my will, my affections, into the brains
of daughters, sisters, lovers caught in the crossfire
of terrorists of the mind.
In the black mirror of the subway window
hangs my own face, hollow with anger and desire.
Swathed in exhaustion, on the trampled newsprint,
a woman shields a dead child from the camera.
The passion to be inscribes her body.
Until we find each other, we are alone.

1974-1975

NATURAL RESOURCES

4.
Could you imagine a world of women only,
the interviewer asked. Can you imagine

a world where women are absent. (He believed
he was joking). Yet I have to imagine

at one and the same moment, both. Because
I live in both. Can you imagine,

the interviewer asked, a world of men?
(He thought he was joking). If so, then,

a world where men are absent?
Absently, wearily, I answered: Yes.

Adrienne Rich.
Poems from the book The dream of a common language (1978).

Selection and transcription of the poems by: Silvia C. Navarro.

Adrienne Cecile Rich. American poet, intellectual, critic, university professor, and lesbian activist. She was born in Baltimore, Maryland (United States), on May 16, 1929.

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