December 7, 1963
White morning flows into the mirror. Her eye, still old with sleep, meets itself like a sister.
How they slept last night, the dream that caged them back to back, was nothing new.
Last words, tears, most often come wrapped as the everyday familiar failure.
Now, pulling the comb slowly through her loosened hair, she tries to find the parting;
it must come out after all: hidden in all that tangle there is a way.
This article is part of The Nation’s 150th Anniversary Special Issue. Download a free PDF of the issue, with articles by James Baldwin, Barbara Ehrenreich, Toni Morrison, Howard Zinn and many more, here.
Over a half-century, Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) wrote twenty-two poems for The Nation and several reviews and essays, including a 2002 piece exploring the meaning of “antiwar.”
Adrienne Rich Adrienne Rich's most recent book is The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004. A selection of her essays, Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations, appeared in 2003. She edited Muriel Rukeyser's Selected Poems for the Library of America. She is a recipient of the National Book Foundation's 2006 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, among other awards. Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems 2004-2006 will be published in October 2007.