RIP Adrienne Rich, 1929-2012

from “Eastern War Time”

An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991)

7.

Memory says: Want to do right? Don’t count on me.

I’m a canal in Europe where bodies are floating

I’m a mass grave   I’m the life that returns

I’m a table set with room for the Stranger

I’m a field with corners left for the landless

I’m accused of child-death   of drinking blood

I’m a man-child praising God he’s a man

I’m a woman bargaining for a chicken

I’m a woman who sells for a boat ticket

I’m a family dispersed between night and fog

I’m an immigrant tailor who says A coat

Is not a piece of cloth only   I sway

In the learning of the master-mystics

I have dreamed of Zion   I’ve dreamed of world revolution

I have dreamed my children could live at last like others

I have walked the children of others through ranks of hatred

I’m a corpse dredged from a canal in Berlin

a river in Mississippi   I’m a woman standing

with other women dressed in black

on the streets of Hiafa, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem

there is spit on my sleeve there are phonecalls in the night

I am a woman standing in line for gasmasks

I stand on a road in Ramallah   with naked face   listening

I am standing here in your poem   unsatisfied

lifting my smoky mirror