Adrienne Rich — The Burning of Paper Instead of Children

"I was in danger of verbalizing my moral impulses out of existence." Daniel Berrigan - on trial in Baltimore 1. My neighbor, a scientist and art-collector, telephones me in a state of violent emotion. He tells me that my son and his, aged eleven and twelve, have on the last day of school burned a mathe- matics textbook in the backyard. He has forbidden my son to come to his house for a week, and has forbidden his own son to leave the house during that time. "The burning of a book," he says, "arouses terrible sensations in me, memories of Hitler; there are few things that upset me so much as the idea of burning a book." Back there: the library, walled with green Britannicas Looking againin Dürer's Complete Works for MELANCOLIA, the baffled woman the crocodiles in Herodotus the Book of the Dead the Trial of Jeanne d'Arc, so blue I think, It is her color and they take the book away because I dream of her too often love and fear in a house knowledge of the oppressor I know it hurts to burn 2. To imagine a time of silence or few words a time of chemistry and music the hollows above your buttocks traced by my hand or, hair is like flesh, you said an age of long silence relief from this tongue this slab of limestone or reinforced concrete fanatics and traders dumped on this coast wildgreen clayred that breathed once in signals of smoke sweep of the wind knowledge of the oppressor this is the oppressor's language yet I need it to talk to you 3. People suffer highly in poverty and it takes dignity and intelli- gence to overcome this suffering. Some of the suffering are: a child did not had dinner last night: a child steal because he did not have money to buy it: to hear a mother say she do not have money to buy food for her children and to see a child without cloth it will make tears in your eyes. (the fracture of order the repair of speech to overcome this suffering) 4. We lie under the sheet after making love, speaking of loneliness relieved in a book relived in a book so on that page the clot and fissure of it appears words of a man in pain a naked word entering the clot a hand grasping through bars: deliverance What happens between us has happened for centuries we know it from literature still it happens sexual jealousy outflung hand beating bed dryness of mouth after panting there are books that describe all this and they are useless You walk into the woods behind a houset here in that country you find a temple built eighteen hundred years ago you enter without knowing what it is you enter so it is with us no one knows what may happen though the books tell everything burn the texts said Artaud 5. I am composing on the typewriter late at night, thinking of today. How well we all spoke. A language is a map of our failures. Frederick Douglass wrote an English purer than Milton's. People suffer highly in poverty. There are methods but we do not use them. Joan, who could not read, spoke some peasant form of French. Some of the suffering are: it is hard to tell the truth; this is America; I cannot touch you now. In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger. The burning of a book arouses no sensation in me. I know it hurts to burn. There are flames of napalm in Catonsville, Maryland. I know it hurts to burn. The typewriter is overheated, my mouth is burning, I cannot touch you and this is the oppressor's language.