Twenty-One Love Poems IV

IV

I come home from you through the early light of spring

flashing off ordinary walls, the Pez Dorado,

the Discount Wares, the shoe-store… I’m lugging my sack

of groceries, I dash for the elevator

where a man, taut, elderly, carefully composed

lets the door almost close on me.—For god’s sake hold it!

I croak at him.—Hysterical,--he breathes my way.

I let myself into the kitchen, unload my bundles,

make coffee, open the window, put on Nina Simone

singing Here comes the sun… I open the mail,

drinking delicious coffee, delicious music,

my body still both light and heavy with you. The mail

lets fall a Xerox of something written by a man

aged 27, a hostage, tortured in prison:

My genitals have been the object of such a sadistic display

they keep me constantly awake with the pain…

Do whatever you can to survive.

You know, I think that men love wars…

And my incurable anger, my unmendable wounds

break open further with tears, I am crying helplessly,

and they still control the world, and you are not in my arms.

This is poem IV, from Adrienne Rich's Twenty-One Love Poems collection, written between 1974-1976.  These were originally published as a complete collection but were later re-published and included as part of another collection of works, written between 1974-1977, called The Dream Of A Common Language.

Twenty-One Love Poems and The Floating Poem, (un-numbered) can all be found here at oldpoetry.