All Poems
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November 1968
© Adrienne Rich
Stripped
you're beginning to float free
up through the smoke of brushfires
and incinerators
the unleafed branches won't hold you
nor the radar aerials
My Mouth Hovers Across Your Breasts
© Adrienne Rich
My mouth hovers across your breasts
in the short grey winter afternoon
Moving in Winter
© Adrienne Rich
Their life, collapsed like unplayed cards,
is carried piecemeal through the snow;
Miracle Ice Cream
© Adrienne Rich
Miracle's truck comes down the little avenue,
Scott Joplin ragtime strewn behind it like pearls,
and, yes, you can feel happy
with one piece of your heart.
Living In Sin
© Adrienne Rich
She had thought the studio would keep itself;
no dust upon the furniture of love.
Integrity
© Adrienne Rich
the quality of being complete; unbroken condition; entirety
~ Webster
A wild patience has taken me this far
In Those Years
© Adrienne Rich
But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove
along the shore, through the rags of fog
where we stood, saying I
In A Classroom
© Adrienne Rich
Talking of poetry, hauling the books
arm-full to the table where the heads
From an Atlas of the Difficult World
© Adrienne Rich
I know you are reading this poem
late, before leaving your office
From a Survivor
© Adrienne Rich
I don't know who we thought we were
that our personalities
could resist the failures of the race
For the Record
© Adrienne Rich
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
For the Dead
© Adrienne Rich
I dreamed I called you on the telephone
to say: Be kinder to yourself
but you were sick and would not answer
Final Notions
© Adrienne Rich
It will not be simple, it will not take long
It will take little time, it will take all your thought
It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath
It will be short, it will not be simple
Burning Oneself Out
© Adrienne Rich
the crimson-flittered grey ash, yes.
I know inside my eyelids
and underneath my skin
A Valediction Forbidding Mourning
© Adrienne Rich
My swirling wants. Your frozen lips.
The grammar turned and attacked me.
Themes, written under duress.
Emptiness of the notations.
The One in Paradise
© Edgar Allan Poe
THOU wast that all to me love
For which my soul did pine --
A green isle in the sea love
A fountain and a shrine
All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers
And all the flowers were mine.
