[Susu.]

I gotta admit that Adrienne Rich is by far my favourite poet, i love her stuff, she is so honest with her feelings.

This first one i love for the simple truth that when we enter into a stormy emotional patch, when depression hits we are futile to try and prevent it, all we can do is weather the storm...

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Storm Warnings

The glass has been falling all the afternoon,
And knowing better than the instrument
What winds are walking overhead, what zone
Of grey unrest is moving across the land,
I leave the book upon a pillowed chair
And walk from window to closed window, watching
Boughs strain against the sky
And think again, as often when the air
Moves inward toward a silent core of waiting,
How with a single purpose time has traveled
By secret currents of the undiscerned
Into this polar realm. Weather abroad
And weather in the heart alike come on
Regardless of prediction.
Between foreseeing and averting change
Lies all the mastery of elements
Which clocks and weatherglasses cannot alter.
Time in the hand is not control of time,
Nor shattered fragments of an instrument
A proof against the wind; the wind will rise,
We can only close the shutters.
I draw the curtains as the sky goes black
And set a match to candles sheathed in glass
Against the keyhole draught, the insistent whine
Of weather through the unsealed aperture.
This is our sole defense against the season;
These are the things we have learned to do
Who live in troubled regions.

This second one is written about the break up of her marrage and is so utterly honest and layered with symbols and meaning that studying it was one of the best things i have ever done

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Trying to Talk With a Man

Out in this desert we are testing bombs,

that's why we came here.

Sometimes I feel an underground river
forcing its way between deformed cliffs
moving itself like a locus of the sun
into this condemned scenery....
....Coming out to this desert
we meant to change the face of
driving among dull green succulents
walking at noon in the ghost town
surrounded by silence

that sounds like the silence of the place

except that it came with us
and is familiar
and everything we were saying until now
was an effort to blot it out--
coming out here we are up against it
Out here I feel more helpless
with you than without you
You mention the danger

and list the equipment
we talk of caring for each other
in emergencies--lacerations, thirst--
but you look at me like an emergency

Your dry heat feels like power
your eyes are stars of a different magnitude
they reflect lights that spell out: EXIT
when you get up and pace the floor
talking of the danger
as if it were not ourselves

This last one is written after her husband's suicide, i love it because even though she had been suicidal, she is finally finding hope even in the face of the breakup of her marriage and subsequent suicide of her husband. I'm not hiding this one because the hope in it shouldn't be hidden away :)

From a Survivor

The pact that we made was the ordinary pact
of men & women in those days

I don’t know who we thought we were
that our personalities
could resist the failures of the race

Lucky or unlucky, we didn’t know
the race had failures of that order
and that we were going to share them

Like everybody else, we thought of ourselves as special

Your body is as vivid to me
as it ever was: even more

since my feeling for it is clearer:
I know what it could and could not do

it is no longer
the body of a god
or anything with power over my life

Next year it would have been 20 years
and you are wastefully dead
who might have made the leap
we talked, too late, of making

which I live now
not as a leap
but a succession of brief, amazing movements

each one making possible the next