Poem in Your Pocket Day: Adrienne Rich

What Kind of Times Are These
 
BY ADRIENNE RICH
 
There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.
 
I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled
this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.
 
I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.
 
And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it's necessary
to talk about trees.
 
“What Kind of Times Are These”. © 2002, 1995 by Adrienne Rich, from The Fact of a Doorframe: Selected Poems 1950-2001 by Adrienne Rich. Used by permission of the author and W.W. Norton, Inc.


Source: Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995 (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 1995)


Source: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/181516

About Adrienne Rich


Poet and essayist Adrienne Rich was one of America’s foremost public intellectuals. Widely read and hugely influential, Rich’s career spanned seven decades and has hewed closely to the story of post-war American poetry itself. Her earliest work, including A Change of World (1951) which won the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Award, was formally exact and decorous, while her work of the late 1960s and 70s became increasingly radical in both its free-verse form and feminist and political content. Rich’s metamorphosis was noted by Carol Muske in the New York Times Book Review; Muske wrote that Rich began as a "polite copyist of Yeats and Auden, wife and mother. She has progressed in life (and in her poems …) from young widow and disenchanted formalist, to spiritual and rhetorical convalescent, to feminist leader...and doyenne of a newly-defined female literature." 


For more, please follow this link: 


http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/adrienne-rich


Image source: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/adrienne-rich







***


If you enjoyed this post, check out my page on Amazon. I’d also be very grateful if you’d help it spread by emailing it to a friend, or sharing it on Twitter or Facebook.





Thank you!