From “For Memory”

2013-03-01

Freedom. It isn’t once, to walk out
under the Milky Way, feeling the rivers
of light, the fields of dark—
freedom is daily, prose-bound, routine
remembering. Putting together, inch by inch
the starry worlds. From all the lost collections.

Excerpted from “For Memory” by Adrienne Rich, published in 1981by  W. W. Norton & Company in her book of poetry A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far.