From a Survivor - A poem by Adrienne Rich

The pact that we made was the ordinary pact of men & women in those days I don't know who we thought we were that our personalities could resist the failures of the race Lucky or unlucky, we didn't know the race had failures of that order and that we were going to share them Like everybody else, we thought of ourselves as special Your body is as vivid to me as it ever was: even more since my feeling for it is clearer: I know what it could and could not do it is no longer the body of a god or anything with power over my life Next year it would have been 20 years and you are wastefully dead who might have made the leap we talked, too late, of making which I live now not as a leap but a succession of brief, amazing movements each one making possible the next

Comment 2 of 2, added on April 8th, 2007 at 12:30 PM.

Prose version of From a Survivor
By Adrienne Rich

The agreement we forged was the usual contract of male and female humans in past times. I ignore the conception we had of our existence: that our collection of emotional and behavioral traits could fight against the deficiencies of humankind. Fortunate or misfortunate, we didn’t recognize that humankind had deficiencies of that sort, and that we were going to share them. Parallel to every other person, we considered us as unique. Your physical whole is as lucid to me as it always was: quite greater because my sensation towards it is defined: I cognize what it may possibly make, it is no longer the physical whole of a divine being or something that possesses authority over my existence. The following time in which the planet completes a revolution around the sun it would have been 20 years and you are inefficiently lifeless. Who may have executed the jump we discussed, after the proper time, of enacting, which I dwell presently not as a jump, but as a progression of concise, marvelous motions, each one forging the following.

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