The pact that we made was the ordinary pact <br />of men & women in those days <br /> <br />I don’t know who we thought we were <br />that our personalities <br />could resist the failures of the race <br /> <br />Lucky or unlucky, we didn’t know <br />the race had failures of that order <br />and that we were going to share them <br /> <br />Like everybody else, we thought of ourselves as special <br /> <br />Your body is as vivid to me <br />as it ever was: even more <br /> <br />since my feeling for it is clearer: <br />I know what it could and could not do <br /> <br />it is no longer <br />the body of a god <br />or anything with power over my life <br /> <br />Next year it would have been 20 years <br />and you are wastefully dead <br />who might have made the leap <br />we talked, too late, of making <br /> <br />which I live now <br />not as a leap <br />but a succession of brief, amazing movements <br /> <br />each one making possible the next<br /><br />Adrienne Rich<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/from-a-survivor/
