Sigh

From a Survivor

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

-Adrienne Rich (1973)

Do you find this poem dark? I don't.

My classmates find this poem dark. I don't.

I asked my tutor today about the difference between free verse and prose, and suggested that the former is always reducible to the latter. He told me that free verse has the distinct advantage of making a certain imagery or statement more impactful, and illustrated this using the same example I used in making my case that there is essentially no difference between free verse and prose.

I am quite convinced by his argument and I think I owe a silent apology to the many poems I have dismissed on the ground that they were essentially prose with line breaks, as well as the poets who wrote them.

I am very weak in poetry.

As well as literary studies.