A Gathering of Poetry: Adrienne Rich | 4.24.25
Greetings everyone and Happy Thursday!
Today is the last Thursday of National Poetry Month, sigh. It is truly my favorite month of the year and I so enjoy the influx of poetry that appears all over during the month!
Today we are all sharing a poem from a very prolific poet, Adrienne Rich, and I was fortunate that my library had a copy of her Collected Poems: 1950-2012… yes, sixty-two years of poetry! The book quickly filled up with “tags” on poems that resonated with me and I wondered how I had never read any of her poetry before Kym had suggested her to be our focus poet.
Despite dozens of poems I really loved, one poem kept calling to me… and I have read it so many times since I first read it. Perhaps I took note of it because in another lifetime, I had the amazing opportunity to learn how to use a planetary projector when I was in middle school. Yes, my middle school (which had a different name in 1972) had a planetarium in it! I know… it astonishes me even today! I have always been fascinated by the night sky… I mean there is nothing like being able to find the North Star and the Big Dipper, and the comfort of Orion spread across the night sky watching over my late night meander with Frankie for his “last trip out” before bed. But after reading this poem, I realized I needed to add Cassiopeia, Andromeda, and the Pleiades to my repertoire!
Today I am sharing Adrienne Rich’s Planetarium, which was originally published in 1971.
Planetarium
by Adrienne Rich
Thinking of Caroline Herschel, 1750–1848,
astronomer,
sister of William; and others.
A woman in the shape of a monster
a monster in the shape of a woman
the skies are full of them
a woman ‘in the snow
among the Clocks and instruments
or measuring the ground with poles’
in her 98 years to discover
8 comets
she whom the moon ruled
like us
levitating into the night sky
riding the polished lenses
Galaxies of women, there
doing penance for impetuousness
ribs chilled
in those spaces of the mind
An eye,
‘virile, precise and absolutely certain’
from the mad webs of Uranusborg
encountering the NOVA
every impulse of light exploding
from the core
as life flies out of us
Tycho whispering at last
‘Let me not seem to have lived in vain’
What we see, we see
and seeing is changing
the light that shrivels a mountain
and leaves a man alive
Heartbeat of the pulsar
heart sweating through my body
The radio impulse
pouring in from Taurus
I am bombarded yet I stand
I have been standing all my life in the
direct path of a battery of signals
the most accurately transmitted most
untranslatable language in the universe
I am a galactic cloud so deep so involuted
that a light wave could take 15
years to travel through me. And has
taken I am an instrument in the shape
of a woman trying to translate pulsations
into images for the relief of the body
and the reconstruction of the mind.
1968
Planetarium © Adrienne Rich. Originally published in The Will to Change, 1971. Republished in Collected Poems: 1950–2012.
You can find more information about Adrienne Rich here.
Thank you so much for “coming along” with us for National Poetry Month! Stop by Bonny’s blog and see what Kym, Sarah, and Vera have shared today!
Now for a bit of housekeeping. Today is a “get away” day for me. As I said Monday, there will be a post to collect us all together to share our word updates, but I won’t be posting until we get back from Erie. See you all back here in May!
