Adrienne Rich, from 'Twenty-One Love Poems'

                        I

Wherever in this city, screens flicker
with pornography, with science-fiction vampires
victimized hirelings bending to the lash,
we also have to walk . . . if simply as we walk
through the rainsoaked garbage, the tabloid cruelties
of our own neighborhoods.
We need to grasp our lives inseperable
from those rancid dreams, that blurt of metal, those disgraces,
and the red begonia perilously flashing
from a tenement still six stories high,
or the long-legged young girls playing ball
in the junior highschool playground.
No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees,
sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air,
dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding,
our animal passion rooted in the city.

-'I', from Twenty-One Love Poems, by Adrienne Rich




Val Telberg - Fire in the Snow (The City No. 3) 1948