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 2007

From Tonight No Poetry Will Serve, published by W.W. Norton. Copyright © 2011 by Adrienne Rich. Used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

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Poems by This Author

Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich First having read the book of myths, The Art of Translation by Adrienne Rich The Burning of Paper Instead of Children by Adrienne Rich

Further Reading

Poems about Language Etymological Dirge by Heather McHugh I Am Much Too Alone in This World, Yet Not Alone by Rainer Maria Rilke please advise stop [I was dragging a ladder slowly over stones stop] by Rusty Morrison Poem by James Schuyler Primitive State [excerpt] by Anselm Berrigan The Composition of the Text by Adriano Spatola The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart by Jack Gilbert Water Music by Robert Creeley What Is an Epigram? by Samuel Taylor Coleridge Yes by Denise Duhamel Poems of Queer Experience Abandonment Under the Walnut Tree by D. A. Powell Antique by Arthur Rimbaud Blue by May Swenson Calamus [In Paths Untrodden] by Walt Whitman elegy for kari edwards by Julian T. Brolaski Elegy in Joy [excerpt] by Muriel Rukeyser He would not stay for me, and who can wonder by A. E. Housman Langston Blue by Jericho Brown Lullaby by W. H. Auden Queer by Frank Bidart Starlight by William Meredith syntax by Maureen N. McLane The Embrace by Mark Doty The Hug by Thom Gunn The Next Table by C. P. Cavafy Untitled [You did say, need me less and I'll want you more] by Marilyn Hacker