Here is a poem about possibilities. It is by poet Adrienne Rich, who died in 2012 after a hugely successful career as a poet and essayist, feminist and activist.
The poem below feels like it was written after a turning point, or significant change, in her life. Indeed, she had many. Here is a great article from The Guardian about the poet. And, here is The Poetry Foundation’s summary of her intriguing life.
DreamwoodIn the old, scratched, cheap wood of the typing standthere is a landscape, veined, which only a child can seeor the child’s older self, a poet,a woman dreaming when she should be typingthe last report of the day. If this were a map,she thinks, a map laid down to memorizebecause she might be walking it, it showsridge upon ridge fading into hazed deserthere and there a sign of aquifersand one possible watering-hole. If this were a mapit would be the map of the last age of her life,not a map of choices but a map of variationson the one great choice. It would be the map by whichshe could see the end of touristic choices,of distances blued and purpled by romance,by which she would recognize that poetryisn’t revolution but a way of knowingwhy it must come. If this cheap, mass-producedwooden stand from the Brooklyn Union Gas Co.,mass-produced yet durable, being here now,is what it is yet a dream-mapso obdurate, so plain,she thinks, the material and the dream can joinand that is the poem and that is the late report.
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This post was originally published in Zeteo Journal.