Adrienne Rich, Some Star Watching, Not Writing For So Long And Embarrassing Myself

I've gotten away from posting about things I really, really like lately. I'm trying to be better at that. It's hard, though, to write about subjects so near and dear to my heart. More often than not, it just turns into bits of rhetorical nonsense and/or melodramatic sappiness (see below). So for now, I'm going to post a short poem by Adrienne Rich, because I like her, and if you like poetry, even just a little bit, you should, too.


Planetarium

Thinking of Caroline Herschel, 1750-1848, Astronomer, Sister of William; and Others

A woman in the shape of a monster
a monster in the shape of a woman
the skies are full of them

a woman 'in the snow
among the Clocks and instruments
or measuring the ground with poles'

in her 98 years to discover
8 comets

She whom the moon ruled
like us
levitating into the night sky
riding the polished lenses

Galaxies of women, there
doing penance for impetuousness
ribs chilled


in those spaces of the mind

An eye,
'virile, precise and absolutely certain'
from the mad webs of Uranusborg
encountering the NOVA
every impulse of light exploding
from the core
as life flies out of us

Tycho whispering at last
'Let me not seem to have lived in vain'

What we see, we see
and seeing is changing

the light that shrivels a mountain
and leaves a man alive

Heartbeat of the pulsar
heart sweating through my body

The radio impulse
pouring in from Taurus

I am bombarded yet I stand
I have been standing all my life in the
direct path of a battery of signals
the most accurately transmitted most
untranslatable language in the universe
I am a galactic cloud so deep so invo-
luted that a light wave could take 15
years to travel through me And has
taken I am an instrument in the shape
of a woman trying to translate pulsations
into images for the relief of the body
and the reconstruction of the mind.

(Adrienne Rich, 1971)