A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far: Poems 1978-1981 by Adrienne Rich

Author:Adrienne Rich [Rich, Adrienne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 1993-07-17T05:00:00+00:00

GRANDMOTHERS

1. Mary Gravely Jones

We had no petnames, no diminutives for you,

always the formal guest under my father’s roof:

you were “Grandmother Jones” and you visited rarely.

I see you walking up and down the garden,

restless, southern-accented, reserved, you did not seem

my mother’s mother or anyone’s grandmother.

You were Mary, widow of William, and no matriarch,

yet smoldering to the end with frustrate life,

ideas nobody listened to, least of all my father.

One summer night you sat with my sister and me

in the wooden glider long after twilight,

holding us there with streams of pent-up words.

You could quote every poet I had ever heard of,

had read The Opium Eater, Amiel and Bernard Shaw,

your green eyes looked clenched against opposition.

You married straight out of the convent school,

your background was country, you left an unperformed

typescript of a play about Burr and Hamilton,

you were impotent and brilliant, no one cared

about your mind, you might have ended

elsewhere than in that glider

reciting your unwritten novels to the children.

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.