"Women Are Poems"

But, so are trees, oceans, war, lovers, the breakfast table, God and other concepts.  However, some women can write poetry, so they are of even greater value.

We honor Adrienne Rich, who died on 29 March, at aged 82, just before Poetry Month.

Celebrate April is Poetry Month with Books on First, on 6 April (Good Friday) at 7pm, when we will gather to read, recite, perform and most of all, listen to poetry.

Second Sight
1

Tonight I could write many verses
beginning     Let this not happen
for a woman leaning over a thirtieth story railing
in hot July     worn webbed-plastic
chairs aglare on the nickel-colored balcony
foreseeing in tracked patterns
of a project landscape
the hammer brought
down by one child upon another's skull

Not moved yet     she     and hers
her child inside     gazing
at a screen
and she a reader once     now a woman foreseeing

elbows sore with the weight
she has placed them
a woman on a balcony with a child inside
gazing at a screen

2

A woman     neither  architect nor engineer     construes the
     dustmotes
of a space primed for neglect
Indoor, outdoor exhausted air

Paths that have failed as paths     trees
that have failed as trees

Practiced in urban literacy she
traverses and assesses streets and bridges
tilting the cumbrous ornamental sewer lids ajar
in search of reasons underground
          which there why this must be

-Adrienne Rich 1999-2000 from fox: Poems 1998-2000