Adrienne Rich - For Julia in Nebraska lyrics

Here on the divide between the Republican and
The Little Blue lived some of
The most courageous people of the frontier
Their fortunes and their loves live
Again in the writings of Willa Cather
Daughter of the plains and interpreter of
Man’s growth in these fields and
In the valleys beyond

On this beautiful, ever-changing land
Man fought to establish a home in
Her vision of the plow against the sun
Symbol of the beauty and importance of
Work, Willa Cather caught the eternal
Blending of earth and sky

In the Midwest of Willa Cather
The railroad looks like a braid of hair
A grandmother’s strong hands plaited
Straight down a grand daughter’s back
Out there last autumn the streets


Dreamed copper-lustre, the fields
Of winter wheat whispered long
Snows yet to fall
We were talking of matrices

And now it’s spring again already
This stormy Sunday lashed with rain
I call you in Nebraska
Hear you’re planting your garden
Sanding and oiling a burl of wood
Hear in your voice the intention to
Survive the long war between mind and body
And we make a promise to talk
This year, about growing older

And I think: we’re making a pledge
Though not much in books of ritual
Is useful between women
We still can make vows together
Long distance, in electrical code:
Today you were promising me
To live, and I took your word
Julia, as if it were my own:
We’ll live to grow old and talk about it too

I’ve listened to your words
Seen you stand by the caldron’s glare
Rendering grammar by the heat
Of your womanly wrath brave linguist
Bearing your double axe and shield
Painfully honed and polished
No word lies cool on your tongue
Bent on restoring meaning to
Our lesbian names, in quiet fury
Weaving the chronicle so violently torn

On this beautiful, ever-changing land
The historical marker says
Man fought to establish a home
(fought whom? the marker is mute)
They named this Catherland, for Willa Cather
Lesbian the marker is mute
The marker white men set on a soil
Of broken treaties, Indian blood
Women wiped out in childbirth, massacres
For Willa Cather, lesbian
Whose letters were burnt in shame

Dear Julia, Willa knew at her death
That the very air was changing
That her Archbishop’s skies
Would hardly survive his life
She knew as well that history
Is neither your script nor mine
It is the pictograph
From which the young must learn
Like Tom Outland, from people
Discredited or dead
That it needs a telling as plain
As the prairie, as the tale
Of a young girl or an old woman
Told by tongues that loved them

And Willa who could not tell
Her own story as it was
Left us her stern and delicate
Respect for the lives she loved
How are we going to do better?
For that’s the question that lies
Beyond our excavations
The question I ask of you
And myself, when our maps diverge
When we miss signals, fail

And if I’ve written in passion
Live, Julia! what was I writing
But my own pledge to myself
Where the love of women is rooted?
And what was I invoking
But the matrices we weave
Web upon web, delicate rafters
Flung in audacity to the prairie skies
Nets of telepathy contrived
To outlast the iron road
Laid out in blood across the
Land they called virgin
Nets, strands, a braid of hair
A grandmother’s strong hands plaited
Straight down a grand daughter’s back