"comrade" and "voices", by Adrienne Rich

"comrade" and "voices", by Adrienne Rich, originalmente cargada por lia villares.

pic by Ricardo Villares, 2009

comrade

Little as I knew you I know you: little as you knew me you
know me
-that’s the light we stand under when we meet.
I’ve looked into flecked jaws
walked injured beaches footslick in oil
watching licked birds stumble in flight
across your own oceans in visionary pain and in relief
lour city’s wounds ancient and fertile
listening for voices within and against.
My testimony: yours: Trying to keep faith
not with each other exactly yet it’s the one know and
unknown
who stand for, imagines the other with whom faith could be
kept.

In city your mind burns wanes waxes with hope
(no stranger to bleakness you: worms have toothed at your
truths
but you were honest regarding that).
You conspired to compile the illegal discography
of songs forbidden to sing or to be heard.
If there ethical flowers one would surely be yours
and I’d hand it to you headlong across landmines
purposefully, with love, a hand trying to keep beauty
afloat
on the bacterial waters.

When a voice learns to sing it can be heard as dangerous
when a voice learns to listen it can be heard as desperate.
The self unlocked ward from solitary from preventive
detention
sees in her thicket of hair her lost eyebrows
whole populations.
One who discharged from war stares in the looking-glass of
home
at what he finds there, sees in the undischarged tumult of his
own eye
how thickskinned peace is, and those who claim to promote
it.



voices (final fragment)

“In the heart of the capital of Capital
against banked radiations of azalea
I found a faux-marble sarcophagus inscribed
H E R E  L I E S  T H E  W I L L  O F   T H E  P E O P L E
I had been wondering why for so long so little
had been heard from that quartet.
I found myself there by deepest accident
wandering among white monuments
looking for the Museum of Lost Causes.

A strangely focused many-lumened glare
Was swallowing alive the noon.
I saw the reviewing stand the podium draped and swagger
The huge screen all-enhancing and all-heightening
I heard the martial bands the choirs the speeches
amplified in the vacant plaza
swearing to the satellites it had been a natural death.”