Adrienne Rich — Translations

You show me the poems of some woman my age, or younger translated from your language Certain words occur: enemy, oven, sorrow enough to let me know she's a woman of my time obsessed with Love, our subject: we've trained it like ivy to our walls baked it like bread in our ovens worn it like lead on our ankles watched it through binoculars as if it were a helicopter bringing food to our famine or the satellite of a hostile power I begin to see that woman doing things: stirring rice ironing a skirt typing a manuscript till dawn trying to make a call from a phonebooth The phone rings endlessly in a man's bedroom she hears him telling someone else Never mind. She'll get tired. hears him telling her story to her sister who becomes her enemy and will in her own way light her own way to sorrow ignorant of the fact this way of grief is shared, unnecessary and political