ADRIENNE RICH'S 'SCHOOL' SETS ME FREE

I am feeling so much freedom reading Adrienne Rich this time. What a stimulus to loving language (and thus to write).

Excerpt 1:

“... when fear vacuums out the streets

When the whole town flinches

blood on the undersole thickening to glass

Whoever crosses hunched knees bent

in a contested zone

knows why she does this suicidal thing …”

- Adrienne Rich, from the poem of the same name in “The School Among the Ruins”

Excerpt 2:

"... I need the border-crossing eye of a tornado

I need an ancestor fleeing into Canada
to rampage freedom there or keep on fleeing
to keep on fleeing or invent a genre
to distemper ideology."
-- from the poem “Variations on Lines from a Canadian Poet” in  “The School Among the Ruins”