Adrienne Rich - When We Dead Awaken lyrics

1. Trying to tell you how the anatomy of the park through stained panes, the way guerrillas are advancing through minefields, the trash burning endlessly in the dump to return to heaven like a stain–– everything outside our skins is an image of this affliction: stones on my table, carried by hand from scenes I trusted souvenirs of what I once described as happiness everything outside my skin speaks of the fault that sends me limping even the scars of my decisions even the sun blaze in the mica-vein even you, fellow-creature, sister, sitting across from me, dark with love, working like me to pick apart working with me to remake this trailing knitted thing, this cloth of darkness, this woman's garment, trying to save the skein. 2. The fact of being separate enters your livelihood like a piece of furniture–– a chest of seventeenth-century wood from somewhere in the North. It has a huge lock shaped like a woman's head but the key has not been found. In the compartments are other keys to lost doors, an eye of gla**. Slowly you begin to add things of your own. You come and go reflected in its panels. You give up keeping track of anniversaries, you begin to write in your diaries more honestly than ever. 3. The lovely landscape of southern Ohio betrayed by strip mining, the thick gold band on the adulterer's finger the blurred programs of the offshore pirate station are causes for hesitation. Here in matrix of need and anger, the disproof of what we thought possible failures of medication doubts of another's existence–– tell it over and over, the words get thick with unmeaning–– yet never have we been closer to the truth of the lies we were living, listen to me: the faithfulness I can imagine would be a weed flowering in tar, a blue energy piercing the ma**ed atoms of a bedrock disbelief.