Posting in an gap between electrical storms...

I've written many election reaction posts in the long hours since. In my head, in notebooks, in locked posts, in deleted posts. There's stuff I want to say, but I'm not quite there yet. Maybe I never will be and you'll be spared. Or maybe I'll just go for it tomorrow, assuming the weather cooperates. Dunno yet. In between writing sentence fragments and ranting at my poor mother about the environment, I've been watching a lot of Xena. There's something rather satisfying about watching a couple of women in a committed, loving relationship fighting for freedom, justice, and equality, and beating the everloving hell out of the baddies while doing so. Right on, sisters.

Anyway, I wanted to catch the tail-end of the poetry meme that was making the rounds again. Not that I need an excuse to post poetry, I suppose. I certainly read enough of it. I wonder why I don't share more. Ah well. I should probably cut this, but LJ's not cooperating. Sorry.


From A Survivor
by Adrienne Rich

The pact that we made was the ordinary pact
of men & women in those days

I don't know who we thought we were
that our personalities
could resist the failures of the race

Lucky or unlucky, we didn't know
the race had failures of that order
and that we were going to share them

Like everybody else, we thought of ourselves as special

Your body is as vivid to me
as it ever was: even more

since my feeling for it is clearer:
I know what it could and could not do

it is no longer
the body of a god
or anything with power over my life

Next year it would have been 20 years
and you are wastefully dead
who might have made the leap
we talked, too late, of making

which I live now
not as a leap
but a succession of brief, amazing movements

each one making possible the next