I first encountered Adrienne Rich’s “Yom Kippur, 1984” in a college course on Performance of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. I was drawn to it instantly and knew it would be no easy feat to interpret. I lived and struggled with the complex text, workshopping a staging of it in class. A year later, my senior capstone project was a one-woman show based on Rich’s essays and poetry. It earned me an award from the Department of Performance Studies, which they presented to me along with a copy of her collected early poems. Her profound and prolific body of work occupies a unique place in my heart and soul that no other writer—and I admire many writers—has ever approached. I was too shy to ever write to her, but I did meet her once at a reading and had her sign my prized book prize.
I have returned to this poem every year on Yom Kippur since that first reading. I haven’t spent the high holidays in a synagogue for almost as many years, and my ritual reading has taken on a spiritual quality. Though my own writing prowess comes nowhere near that of my inspiration, I humbly offer this homage.
What is a poet who stops writing?
What does it mean to write poetry
on the device that has stolen our souls?
What is a queer woman with a husband: privileged, or confused?
In congested streets, on the crowded train, in this valley of tech’s delights, what meaning is left to be revealed?
I drive to the beach, the forest, the desert, searching
I fly to the antipodes and still it eludes
Adrienne, I lacked the courage to address you while you lived
but the poet’s book is immortal, ever-changing as the words find new frequencies at which to resonate
Today we wake in darkness fed on greed and vanishing truth.
We awaken to a shooting at a German synagogue,
no more time for trembling and weeping than there is for fasting and prayers.
(If I‘d been raised to keep the sabbath, would i have learned the value of rest)
I mourn a democracy that never was
dream of utopias that never will be,
but here in the world that is, the meaning of these things is less than real and more absurd than a Beckett play.
Time has done and undone
the injustices of yesterday never left us they have multiplied on our watch
women’s bodies still a thing for men to control
young black men still being shot on the streets in their cars at the Wal-Mart
crooked cops go free crooked con men steal a country that was stolen from the first
In the absence of meaning, the meaning of absence
the poet turns inward.
I have wandered the desert these thirty-five years
my time is coming.
O, my literary heroine,
if only I believed in something that would have you witness this,
have you speak to me from Orion’s belt and guide me to some greater courage.
The sky is silent this October night.
Mountainsides burn and lupines bloom for another generation.
Books are written.
Names are inscribed.
If I am cut off from my people who will feel the phantom limb?
What is a poet who writes on her phone?
What is a socialist with a 401k and manicured nails?
When the Pacific rises to reclaim our shores,
when darkness and flames engulf our cities,
when the refugee’s child cries and no one hears
in what corner of this world we have summoned
will we find what meaning remains?