Sistered Wishes Beat These Walls

If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented on that day….For there would be an intolerable hunger.

Muriel Rukeyser

Sonnet

by Muriel Rukeyser

My thoughts through yours refracted into speech
transmute this room musically tonight,
the notes of contact flowing, rhythmic, bright
with an informal art beyond my single reach.

Outside, dark birds fly in a greening time :
wings of our sistered wishes beat these walls :
and words afflict our minds in near footfalls
approaching with latening hour’s chime.

And if an essential thing has flown between us,
rare intellectual bird of communication,
let us seize it quickly : let our preference
choose it instead of softer things to screen us
each from the other’s self : muteness or hesitation,
nor petrify live miracle by our indifference.

Intolerable hungers pervade us and we somehow are surprised that this is so?   Look around at nature, intolerable hungers are everywhere, we intellectualize them as instinct but tell that to the salmon spawning upstream, returning from the deep ocean to the very river of their creation.  It is an intolerable hunger that propels them up water falls.

Intolerable hunger comes in all shapes and sizes, as many different kinds as there are people and species on the planet.   There are the common everyday hungers of sustenance, sex, vocation, communion and connection.   Then there are the uniquely personal intolerant foibles that define ourselves as a unique human being, a subset of one, on a planet of 7 billion.

What intolerable hunger propels you?   How will you feed and nurture your hunger today?  What will bring you satisfaction and temporarily silence the ache for more?

Twenty One Love Poems

XIII

by Adrienne Rich

The rules break like a thermometer,
quicksilver spills across the charted systems,
we’re out in a country that has no language
no laws, we’re chasing the raven and the wren
through gorges unexplored since dawn
whatever we do together is pure invention
the maps they gave us were out of date
by years… we’re driving through the desert
wondering if the water will hold out
the hallucinations turn to simple villages
the music on the radio comes clear—
neither Rosenkavalier nor Götterdämmerung
but a woman’s voice singing old songs
with new words, with a quiet bass, a flute
plucked and fingered by women outside the law.