Tonight No Poetry Will Serve Quotes

“Saw you walking barefoot
taking a long look
at the new moon's eyelid

later spread
sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair
asleep but not oblivious
of the unslept unsleeping
elsewhere

Tonight I think
no poetry
will serve

Syntax of rendition:

verb pilots the plane
adverb modifies action

verb force-feeds noun
submerges the subject
noun is choking
verb disgraced goes on doing

now diagram the sentence”
― Adrienne Rich, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve

“For every bandaged wound
I’ll scrape another   open”
― Adrienne Rich, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve

“Those years you never looked at any of us. Staring into your own eyelids. Like you saw a light there. Can you see me now?”
― Adrienne Rich, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve

“Victories turned inside out
But no surrender

Cemeteries of remorse
The beaten champion sobbing
Ghosts move in to shield his tears”
― Adrienne Rich, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve

“The dead” we say   as if speaking
of “the people” who

gave up on making history
simply to get through

Something dense and null   groan
without echo   underground

and owl-voiced I cry Who
are these dead people these

lovers who if ever did
listen no longer answer

: We :”
― Adrienne Rich, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve

“The I you know isn’t me, you said, truthtelling liar
My roots are not my chains
And I to you:   Whose hands have grown
through mine?   Owl-voiced I cried then:   Who?
But yours was the one, the only eye assumed
Did we turn each other into liars?
holding hands with each others’ chains?”
― Adrienne Rich, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve

“Tongue on your words to taste you there
Couldn’t   read what you
had never written there

Played your message over
feeling bad
Played your message over it was all I had
To tell me what and wherefore
this is what it said:

I’m tired of you asking me why
I’m tired of words like the chatter of birds

Give me a pass, let me just get by”
― Adrienne Rich, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve