Collected Early Poems by Adrienne Rich

Author:Adrienne Rich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

“Or let us, being today

Too rational to cry out,

Or trample underfoot

What after all preserves

A certain savor yet—

Though torn up by the roots—

Let us make our compromise

With the terror and the guilt

And view as curious relics

Once found in daily use

The mythology, the names

That, however Time has corrupted

Their ancient purity

Still burn like yellow flames,

But their fire is not for us.”

And yet, however we choose

To deny or to remember,

Though on the calendars

We wake and suffer by,

This day is merely one

Of thirty in September—

In the kernel of the mind

The new year must renew

This day, as for our kind

Over five thousand years,

The task of being ourselves.

Whatever we strain to forget,

Our memory must be long.

May the taste of honey linger

Under the bitterest tongue.

1955

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.