Collected Poems

by Adrienne Rich

  That’s why I want to speak to you now.To say: no person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone.There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors.(I make up this strange, angry packet for you, threaded with love.)I think you thought there was no such place for you, and perhaps there was none then, and perhaps there is none now; but we will have to make it, we who want an end to suffering, who want to change the laws of history, if we are not to give ourselves away.

  XXIII

  Sixteen years ago I sat in this northeast kingdom

  reading Gilbert White’s Natural History

  of Selbornethinking

  I can never know this land I walk upon

  as that English priest knew his

  —a comparable piece of earth—

  rockledgesoilinsectbirdweedtree

  I will never know it so well because …

  Because you have chosen

  something else:to know other things

  even the cities which

  create of this a myth

  Because you grew up in a castle of air

  disjunctured

  Because without a faith

  you are faithful

  I have wished I could rest among the beautiful and common weeds I cán name, both here and in other tracts of the globe.But there is no finite knowing, no such rest. Innocent birds, deserts, morning-glories, point to choices. leading away from the familiar. When I speak of an end to suffering I don’t mean anesthesia. I mean knowing the world, and my place in it, not in order to stare with bitterness or detachment, but as a powerful and womanly series of choices:and here I write the words, in their fullness:

  powerful;womanly.

  August 1981–

  August 1982

  II

  North American Time

  … traigo este calendario.

  Sí; aquí se marca el tiempo.

  Es almanaque por lo tanto, solo

  que es tiempo injusto el que aparece …

  —Georgina Herrera

  (… I offer this calendar.

  Yes; here time is marked.

  It’s an almanac therefore, but

  only unjust time appears.)

  FOR THE RECORD

  The clouds and the stars didn’t wage this war

  the brooks gave no information

  if the mountain spewed stones of fire into the river

  it was not taking sides

  the raindrop faintly swaying under the leaf

  had no political opinions

  and if here or there a house

  filled with backed-up raw sewage

  or poisoned those who lived there

  with slow fumes, over years

  the houses were not at war

  nor did the tinned-up buildings

  intend to refuse shelter

  to homeless old women and roaming children

  they had no policy to keep them roaming

  or dying, no, the cities were not the problem

  the bridges were non-partisan

  the freeways burned, but not with hatred

  Even the miles of barbed-wire

  stretched around crouching temporary huts

  designed to keep the unwanted

  at a safe distance, out of sight

  even the boards that had to absorb

  year upon year, so many human sounds

  so many depths of vomit, tears

  slow-soaking blood

  had not offered themselves for this

  The trees didn’t volunteer to be cut into boards

  nor the thorns for tearing flesh

  Look around at all of it

  and ask whose signature

  is stamped on the orders, traced

  in the corner of the building plans

  Ask where the illiterate, big-bellied

  women were, the drunks and crazies,

  the ones you fear most of all:ask where you were.

  1983

  NORTH AMERICAN TIME

  I

  When my dreams showed signs

  of becoming

  politically correct

  no unruly images

  escaping beyond borders

  when walking in the street I found my

  themes cut out for me

  knew what I would not report

  for fear of enemies’ usage

  then I began to wonder

  II

  Everything we write

  will be used against us

  or against those we love.

  These are the terms,

  take them or leave them.

  Poetry never stood a chance

  of standing outside history.

  One line typed twenty years ago

  can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint

  to glorify art as detachment

  or torture of those we

  did not love but also

  did not want to kill

  We movebut our words stand

  become responsible

  for more than we intended

  and this is verbal privilege

  III

  Try sitting at a typewriter

  one calm summer evening

  at a table by a window

  in the country, try pretending

  your time does not exist

  that you are simply you

  that the imagination simply strays

  like a great moth, unintentional

  try telling yourself

  you are not accountable

  to the life of your tribe

  the breath of your planet

  IV

  It doesn’t matter what you think.

  Words are found responsible

  all you can do is choose them

  or choose

  to remain silent.Or, you never had a choice,

  which is why the words that do stand

  are responsible

  and this is verbal privilege

  V

  Suppose you want to write

  of a woman braiding

  another woman’s hair—

  straight down, or with beads and shells

  in three-stand plaits or corn-rows—

  you had better know the thickness

  the lengththe pattern

  why she decides to braid her hair

  how it is done to her

  what country it happens in

  what else happens in that country

  You have to know these things

  VI

  Poet, sister:words—

  whether we like it or not—

  stand in a time of their own.

  No use protestingI wrote that

  before Kollontai was exiled

  Rosa Luxemburg, Malcolm,

  Anna Mae Aquash, murdered,

  before Treblinka, Birkenau,

  Hiroshima, before Sharpeville,

  Biafra, Bangladesh, Boston,

  Atlanta, Soweto, Beirut, Assam

  —those faces, names of places

  sheared from the almanac

  of North American time

  VII

  I am thinking this in a country

  where words are stolen out of mouths

  as bread is stolen out of mouths

  where poets don’t go to jail

  for being poets, but for being

  dark-skinned, female, poor.

  I am writing this in a time

  when anything we write

  can be used against those we love

  where the context is never given

  though we try to explain, over and over

  For the sake of poetry at least

  I need to know these things

  VIII

  Sometimes, gliding at night

  in a plane over New York City

  I have felt like some messenger

  called to enter, called to engage

  this field of light and da
rkness.

  A grandiose idea, born of flying.

  But underneath the grandiose idea

  is the thought that what I must engage

  after the plane has raged onto the tarmac

  after climbing my old stairs, sitting down

  at my old window

  is meant to break my heart and reduce me to silence.

  IX

  In North America time stumbles on

  without moving, only releasing

  a certain North American pain.

  Julia de Burgos wrote:

  That my grandfather was a slave

  is my grief;had he been a master

  that would have been my shame.

  A poet’s words, hung over a door

  in North America, in the year

  nineteen-eighty-three.

  The almost-full moon rises

  timelessly speaking of change

  out of the Bronx, the Harlem River

  the drowned towns of the Quabbin

  the pilfered burial mounds

  the toxic swamps, the testing-grounds

  and I start to speak again

  1983

  EDUCATION OF A NOVELIST

  (Italicized lines quoted from Ellen Glasgow’s autobiography, The Woman Within.)

  I

  Looking backtrying to decipher

  yourself and Lizzie Jones:

  We were strange companions, but

  that everyone knew us:a dark

  lean, eager colored woman

  and a small, pale, eager little girl

  roaming together, hand-in-hand

  Waking early, Mammy and I

  would be dressed before the family had risen

  spurred on by an inborn love

  of adventure

  a vital curiosity

  … visiting

  the neighbors and the neighbors’ cooks and with the neighbors’ maids

  sweeping the brick pavement

  and the apothecary

  and the friendly light-colored letter-carrier

  But when you made one visit to the almshouse

  “Mammy” was reprimanded

  II

  I revolted from sentimentality

  less because it was false then because

  it was cruel …

  In the country, later

  the Black artist spent her genius on the white children

  Mammy was with us; we were all happy together

  (I revolted from sentimentalitywhen it suited me)

  She would dress us as gypsies, darken

  our faces with burnt cork

  We would start

  on a long journey, telling fortunes

  wherever we came to a farm or a Negro cabin

  I was always the one who would

  think up the most exciting fortunes

  (I, too, was always the one)

  III

  Where or how I learned to read

  (you boast so proudly)I could never

  rememberAfter supper

  in front of the fire, undressing by candlelight

  Mammy and I would take up and spin out

  the story left from the evening before

  Nobody ever taught me to read

  (Nobody had to,

  it was your birthright, Ellen.)

  “As soon as I learn my letters,

  Mammy, I’m going to teach you yours”

  IV

  Givens, Ellen. That we’d pick out our way

  through the Waverly novels

  that our childish, superior fire

  was destined for fortune

  even though femaledeafor lame

  dewomanizedThe growing suspicion

  haunting the growing life

  the sense of exile in a hostile world

  how do we use that?

  and for what?

  with whom?

  Givens.The pale skin, the eager look, the fact

  of having been known

  by everyone

  our childish, superior fire, and all

  I was always the one …

  Deafness finally drives you

  here, there, to specialists in Europe

  for hardening of the Eustachian tube

  Finding no cure you build

  a wall of deceptive gaietyto shield your pain:

  That I, who was winged for flying, should be

  wounded and caged!

  V

  Lizzie Jones vanishes.Her trace is lost.

  She, who was winged for flying

  Where at the end

  of the nineteenth centuryyou ask

  could one find the Revolution?

  In what mean streets and alleys of the South

  was it then lying in ambush?Though I suffered

  with the world’s suffering. …

  “As soon

  as I learn my letters, Mammy,

  I’m going to teach you yours”

  but by your own admission

  you never did

  Where at the end of the twentieth century

  does the Revolution find us

  in what streets and alleys, north or south

  is it now lying in ambush?

  It’s not enough

  using your words to damn you, Ellen:

  they could have been my own:

  this criss-cross

  map of kept and broken promises

  I was always the one

  1983

  VIRGINIA 1906

  A white woman dreaming of innocence,

  of a country childhood, apple-blossom driftings,

  is held in a DC-10 above the purity

  of a thick cloud ceiling in a vault of purest blue.

  She feels safe.Here, no one can reach her.

  Neither men nor women have her in their power.

  Because I have sometimes been her, because I am of her,

  I watch her with eyes that blink away like a flash

  cruelly, when she does what I don’t want to see.

  I am tired of innocence and its uselessness,

  sometimes the dream of innocence beguiles me.

  Nothing has told me how to think of her power.

  Blurredly, apple-blossom drifts

  across rough earth, small trees contort and twist

  making their own shapes, wild.Why should we love purity?

  Can the woman in the DC-10 see this

  and would she call this innocence?If no one can reach her

  she is drawing on unnamed, unaccountable power.

  This woman I have been and recognize

  must know that beneath the quilt of whiteness lies

  a hated nation, hers,

  earth whose wet places call to mind

  still-open wounds:her country.

  Do we love purity?Where do we turn for power?

  Knowing us as I do I cringe when she says

  But I was not culpable,

  I was the victim, the girl, the youngest,

  the susceptible one, I was sick,

  the one who simply had to get out, and did

  : I am still trying how to think of her power.

  And if she was forced, this woman, by the same

  white Dixie boy who took for granted as prey

  her ignored dark sisters?What if at five years old

  she was old to his fingers splaying her vulva open

  what if forever after, in every record

  she wants her name inscribed as innocent

  and will not speak, refuses to know, can say

  I have been numb for years

  does not want to hear of any violation

  like or unlike her own, as if the victim

  can be innocent only in isolation

  as if the victim dare not be intelligent

  (I have been numb for years):and if this woman

  longs for an intact world, an intact soul,

  longs for what we all long for, yet denies us all?

  What has
she smelled of power without once

  tasting it in the mouth? For what protections

  has she traded her wildness and the lives of others?

  There is a porch in Salem, Virginia

  that I have never seen, that may no longer stand,

  honeysuckle vines twisting above the talk,

  a driveway full of wheeltracks, paths going down

  to the orchards, apple and peach,

  divisions so deep a wild child lost her way.

  A child climbing an apple-tree in Virginia

  refuses to come down, at last comes down

  for a neighbor’s lying bribe.Now, if that child, grown old

  feels safe in a DC-10 above thick white clouds

  and no one can reach her

  and if that woman’s child, another woman

  chooses another way, yet finds the old vines

  twisting across her path, the old wheeltracks

  how does she stop dreaming the dream

  of protection, how does she follow her own wildness

  shedding the innocence, the childish power?

  How does she keep from dreaming the old dreams?

  1983

  DREAMS BEFORE WAKING

  Despair is the question.

  —Elie Wiesel

  Hasta tu país cambió. Lo has cambiado tú mismo.

  —Nancy Morejón

  Despair falls:

  the shadow of a building

  they are raising in the direct path

  of your slender ray of sunlight

  Slowly the steel girders grow

  the skeletal framework rises

  yet the western light still filters

  through it all

  still glances off the plastic sheeting

  they wrap around it

  for dead of winter