My mouth hovers across your breasts
in the short grey winter afternoon
in this bed we are delicate
and touch so hot with joy we amaze ourselves
tough and delicate we play rings
around each other our daytime candle burns
with its peculiar light and if the snow
begins to fall outside filling the branches
and if the night falls without announcement
there are the pleasures of winter
sudden, wild and delicate your fingers
exact my tongue exact at the same moment
stopping to laugh at a joke
my love hot on your scent on the cusp of winter
Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Rich was born in Baltimore Maryland in 1929. She attended Radcliffe College and graduated in 1951. Her first book of poetry A Change of the World was published that year. On a Guggenheim Fellowship she traveled to Europe where she married economic professor Alfred H. Conrad in 1953 and had 3 sons. In 1966 the family moved to New York City Rich became involved in the social and political actions of the day. She separated from her husband and became active in the women’s liberation movement. Adrienne Rich came out as a lesbian in 1976 and published her groundbreaking volume, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. Rich’s essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” was written during this same period.
Rich refused the National Medal of Arts in 1997 stating that “I could not accept such an award from President Clinton or this White House because the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration.”
In February of 2003, Rich along with other poets, in protest of the Iraq War, refused to attend a White House symposium on “Poetry and the American Voice.”
Adrienne Rich and her partner of 32 years, Michelle Cliff live in Santa Cruz California.
Poet W.S. Merwin said about Rich, “All her life she has been in love with the hope of telling the utter truth, and her command of language from the first has been startlingly powerful.”
Rich’s poems on line: www.poemhunter.com/adriennerich. |
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