Mathy

Power

-Adrienne Rich

Living in the earth-deposits of our history

Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil

She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power

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For The Record

-Adrienne Rich

The clouds and the stars didn’t wage this war
the brooks gave no information
if the mountain spewed stones of fire into the river
it was not taking sides
the raindrop faintly swaying under the leaf
had no political opinions

and if here or there a house
filled with backed-up raw sewage
or poisoned those who lived there
with slow fumes, over years
the houses were not at war
nor did the tinned-up buildings

intend to refuse shelter
to homeless old women and roaming children
they had no policy to keep them roaming
or dying, no, the cities were not the problem
the bridges were non-partisan
the freeways burned, but not with hatred

Even the miles of barbed-wire
stretched around crouching temporary huts
designed to keep the unwanted
at a safe distance, out of sight
even the boards that had to absorb
year upon year, so many human sounds

so many depths of vomit, tears
slow-soaking blood
had not offered themselves for this
The trees didn’t volunteer to be cut into boards
nor the thorns for tearing flesh
Look around at all of it

and ask whose signature
is stamped on the orders, traced
in the corner of the building plans
Ask where the illiterate, big-bellied
women were, the drunks and crazies,
the ones you fear most of all: ask where you were

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From an Atlas of the Difficult World

-Adrienne Rich

I know you are reading this poem
late, before leaving your office
of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window
in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet
long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem
standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean
on a grey day of early spring, faint flakes driven
across the plains’ enormous spaces around you.
I know you are reading this poem
in a room where too much has happened for you to bear
where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed
and the open valise speaks of flight
but you cannot leave yet. I know you are reading this poem
as the underground train loses momentum and before running
up the stairs
toward a new kind of love
your life has never allowed.
I know you are reading this poem by the light
of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide
while you wait for the newscast from the intifada.
I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room
of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers.
I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light
in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,
count themselves out, at too early an age. I know
you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick
lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on
because even the alphabet is precious.
I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove
warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your
hand
because life is short and you too are thirsty.
I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language
guessing at some words while others keep you reading
and I want to know which words they are.
I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn
between bitterness and hope
turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.
I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else
left to read
there where you have landed, stripped as you are.

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Adrienne Rich - Wikipedia

More on Adrienne Rich

JACK TODD, The Gazette
Published: Saturday, August 05, 2006

It is a pity that Stephen Harper chose to blow off the opening ceremonies for the First World Outgames.

For our PM, this festival of tolerance might have opened his thinking, shown him that it is possible for people of many different persuasions to coexist, helped him to understand that we need not be a nation of uptight, white bread Reform Tories in order to survive the choppy waters of the 21st century.

Then again, you can lead a mule to water but you can’t make him drink.

You would like to think that exposure to what has happened here during the past week would force Harper to re-think his intention to reopen the whole, thorny same-sex marriage debate. But as he has on so many fronts, Harper seems determined to erase Canada’s international reputation as a nation of tolerance and fairness with a deep-seated respect for human rights and to drag us kicking and screaming back to the 19th century.

Still, it is a shame that Harper could not have talked with Mark Tewksbury, the talented athlete and organizational genius behind the Outgames, or Martina Navratilova, one of the greatest athletes and most courageous advocates in the world.

Sadly, Harper has shown no capacity to learn and grow with the job. He wants to put this country through a trauma it has already endured because he is an ideologue. He wants to decide again an issue that has already been decided because he thinks that his faith ought to be yours, because he knows better than you how you ought to run your life. Because in his skewed vision, the world would be a better place if we were all slightly blimpish Reform Party stalwarts with hair like a Ken doll.

I feel much the same way. If this were my planet to run as I chose, then Tories, Republicans and right-wing born-again Christians would be forbidden to marry and spawn children.

If such edicts were put into place, this would be a much better world in a generation or two. But as much as I would like to see this Earth freed of the yoke of greedy, narrow-minded, religious hypocrites, I will always defend their right to marry just like normal people.

I am not a gay male; their culture is not my culture. I must confess that sometimes I feel a little uneasy with the general amount of smoochiness that goes on. But we are all squeamish about some things: Given a choice, I would much rather see Daniel Veatch kissing Mark Tewksbury than watch a couple of Republican Party reptiles going at it, because to see George W. and Laura Bush smooching in public would be enough to put me off sex for a month.

But just as I believe that Bush and Harper should tolerate Veatch and Tewksbury and Navratilova and k.d. lang, I also believe that even Tories and Republicans have the right to kiss and procreate and marry if they choose, because human rights cannot and should not be parcelled out according to our prejudices.

By saying that marriages of the same sex should not be tolerated, Harper is, in effect, telling Mark Tewksbury and k.d. lang that they are somehow less worthy citizens, less human than Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, who are still entitled to the sacrament of marriage despite their crimes.

The U.S. for the past two decades and more has had to fight a running battle against the mullahs of the Christian right who have struck from their power base in that Evangelistan south of the Mason-Dixon line to reverse a century and more of social progress on a dozen fronts. Until Harper came to power, Canada has been more or less immune to the excesses of the religious right. No more.

Beyond the moral and social debate, there are very real health concerns involved here. Perhaps the most important argument of all in favour of same-sex marriage was made in these pages in June by

Mark A. Wainberg, director of the McGill University AIDS Centre, and Norbert Gilmore, the centre’s associate director.

They argued that same-sex marriage is an important social tool in the fight against AIDS, the worldwide epidemic that has killed 20 million people since 1980, because such marriages discourage risky, promiscuous behaviour.

“The hope should be that,” Wainberg and Gilmore wrote, “young men and women, mostly in their teens, who struggle with sexual orientation, will understand that being gay is acceptable and that marriage will foster a culture of monogamy and/or stable long-lasting relationships among gay men that will reverse the trends of recent decades.

“We hope the Canadian legislation (that originally legalized same-sex marriage) will result in both less self-imposed as well as external discrimination and will also contribute within homosexual communities to increased monogamy and diminished rates of sexually transmitted disease, values that conservatives have long claimed as their own.”

Conservatives claim a great deal as their own, including the sacrament of marriage. But after same-sex couples waited hours in the rain two years ago for the first legalized unions in San Francisco, Frank Rich of the New York Times wrote: “The first of those couples, Phyllis Lyon, 79, and Del Martin, 83, were celebrating a partnership of 51 years. Take that, heterosexual marriage! The most famous practitioner of mixed-sex nuptials this year, Britney Spears, partook of a Vegas marriage that clocked in at 55 hours.”

All these difficult social and moral victories take decades to achieve and come, in retrospect, to look as ordinary and inevitable as rain and Republicans. There was a time when women could not vote and blacks could not sit at a lunch counter in North Carolina.

Once such a precarious victory has been won, it would be a pity and a shame to see it clawed back by a man who would not feel privileged and honoured to share the spotlight, any spotlight, with the likes of Mark Tewksbury and Martina Navratilova.

jtodd@thegazette.canwest.com