Adrienne Rich - Hunger lyrics

A fogged hill-scene on an enormous continent
Intimacy rigged with terrors
A sequence of blurs the
Chinese painter's ink-stick planned
A scene of desolation comforted
By two human figures recklessly exposed
Leaning together in a sticklike boat
In the foreground maybe we look like this
I don't know i'm wondering
Whether we even have what we think we have -
Lighted windows signifying shelter
A film of domesticity
Over fragile roofs i know I'm
Partly somewhere else -
Huts strung across a drought-stretched land
Not mine, dried breasts, mine and not mine
A mother
Watching my children shrink with hunger
I live in my Western skin
My Western vision, torn
And flung to what I can't
Control or even fathom
Quantify suffering, you could rule the world

They can rule the world while
They can persuade us
Our pain belongs in some order
Is death by famine worse
Than death by suicide
Than a life of famine and suicide
If a black lesbian dies
If a white prostitute dies, if a woman genius
Starves herself to feed others
Self hatred battening on her body?
Something that kills us or
Leaves us half-alive
Is raging under the name of an "act of god"
In Chad, in Niger, in teh Upper Volta -
Yes, that male god that acts on
Us and on our children
That male State that acts on
Us and on our children
Till our brains are blunted by malnutritiou
Yet sharpened by the passion for survival
Our powers expended daily on the struggle
To hand a kind of life on to our children
To change reality for our lovers
Even in a single trembling drop of water

We can look at each other
Through both our lifetimes
Like those two figures in the sticklike boat
Flung together in the Chinese ink-scene
Even our intimacies are rigged with terror
Quantify suffering? My guilt at
Least is open
I stand convicted by all my convictions -
You, too we shrink from touching
Our power, we shrink away
We starve ourselves
And each otehr, we're scared shitless
Of what it could be to take and use our love
Hose it on a city, on a world
To wield and guide it's spray, destroying
Poisons, parasites, rats, viruses -
Like the terrible mothers we long
And dread to be

The decision to feed the world
Is the real decision no revolution
Has chosen it for that choice requires
That women shall be free
I choke on the taste of
Bread in North America
But the taste of hunger in North America
Is poisoning me yes, I'm alive
To write these words
To leaf through Kollwitz's women
Huddling the stricken children into
Their stricken arms
The "mothers" drained of milk
The "survivors" driven
To self-abortion, self-starvation
To a vision bitter, concrete, and wordless
I'm alive to want more than life
Want it for others starving and unborn
To name the deprivations boring
Into my will, my affections, into the brains
Of daughters, sisters
Lovers caught in the crossfire
Of terrorists of the mind
In the black mirror of the subway window
Hangs my own face
Hollow with anger and desire
Swathed in exhaustion, on
The trampled newsprint
A woman shields a dead child from the camera
The passion to be inscribes her body
Until we find each other, we are alone