THIS WE WERE

(1982, Brosnan Street; photo by sharon franklet)

I tell my story. I tell yours, too, where it touches mine. There are an infinite number of answers to the question why, but here is one of them.

From Twenty-One Love Poems, by Adrienne Rich
THE DREAM OF A COMMON LANGUAGE

XVII.

No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone.
The accidents happen, we’re not heroines,
they happen in our lives like car crashes,
books that change us, neighborhoods
we move into and come to love.
Tristan und Isolde is scarcely the story,
women at least should know the difference
between love and death. No poison cup,
no penance. Merely a notion that the tape-recorder
should have caught some ghost of us: that tape-recorder
not merely played but should have listened to us,
and could instruct those after us:
this we were, this is how we tried to love,
and these are the forces they had ranged against us,
and these are the forces we had ranged within us,
within us and against us, against us and within us.


Copyright 1978, Adrienne Rich.

(Hat tip to Heart over at Women's Space for also posting a wave-inducing poem by Adrienne Rich this week, "A wild patience has taken me this far" -- here's to our herstory, word by word.)