Status Updates From Selected Poems

All of them alike, expensive girls, the leaden friends / one used to play the piano, one of them once wrote a sonnet, / one even seemed awakened enough to photograph wheatfields— / the dull girls with the educated minds and technical passions

In 1938 MR wrote a book-length poem about a mining town in which all of the men were dying of silicosis. These memories live in my own bones; these poems break my heart.

What do you want—a cliff over a city?
A foreland, sloped to sea and overgrown with roses?
These people live here.

"In town, the munitions plant has been poor since the war,
And nothing but war will make it rich again."
Holy, holy, holy sings the church next door.

From poem the

Kathe Kollwitz.

“What would happen If one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open”

(The famous last two lines of part III)