One night on Monterey Bay the death-freeze of the century

One night on Monterey Bay the death-freeze of the century:
A precise, detached calliper-grip holds the stars and the quarter-
                         moon
in arrest:      the hardiest plants crouch shrunken, a “killing frost”
on bougainvillea, Pride of Madeira, roseate black-purple succu-
                         lents bowed
Juices sucked awry in one orgy of freezing
slumped on their stems like old faces evicted from cheap hotels
—into the streets of the universe, now!

Earthquake and drought followed by freezing followed by war.
Flags are blossoming now where little else is blossoming
and I am bent on fathoming what it means to love my country.
The history of this earth and the bones within it?
Soils and cities, promises made and mocked, plowed contours of
                         shame and of hope?
Loyalties, symbols, murmurs extinguished and echoing?
Grids of states stretching westward, underground waters?
Minerals, traces, rumors I am made from, morsel, minuscule
                         fibre, one woman
like and unlike so many, fooled as to her destiny, the scope of
                         her task?
One citizen like and unlike so many, touched and untouched in
                         passing
—each of us now a driven grain, a nucleus, a city in crisis
some busy constructing enclosures, bunkers, to escape the com-
                         mon fate
some trying to revive dead statues to lead us, breathing their
                         breath against marble lips
some who try to teach the moment, some who preach
                         the moment
some who aggrandize, some who diminish themselves in the face
                         of half-grasped events
—power and powerlessness run amuck, a tape reeling backward
                         in jeering, screeching syllables—
some for whom war is new, others for whom it merely continues
                         the old paroxysms of time
some marching for peace who for twenty years did not march for
                         justice
some for whom peace is a white man’s word and a white man’s
                        privilege
some who have learned to handle and contemplate the shapes of
                        powerlessness and power
as the nurse learns hip and thigh and weight of the body he has
                        to lift and sponge, day upon day
as she blows with her every skill on the spirit’s embers still burn-
                        ing by their own laws in the bed of death.
A patriot is not a weapon. A patriot is one who wrestles for the
                        soul of her country
as she wrestles for her own being, for the soul of his country
(gazing through the great circle at Window Rock into the sheen
                        of the Viet Nam wall)
as he wrestles for his own being. A patriot is a citizen trying to
                        wake
from the burnt-out dream of innocence, the nightmare
of the white general and the Black general posed in their
                        camouflage,
to remember her true country, remember his suffering land:
                        remember
that blessing and cursing are born as twins and separated at birth
                        to meet again in mourning
that the internal emigrant is the most homesick of all women and
                        of all men
that every flag that flies today is a cry of pain.
                        Where are we moored?
                        What are the bindings?
                        What behooves us?

Part XI "One night on Monterey Bay the death-freeze of the century:" from "An Atlas of the Difficult World". Copyright 2016 by the Adrienne Rich Literary Trust. Copyright (c) 1991 by Adrienne Rich, from COLLECTED POEMS: 1950-2012 by Adrienne Rich. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.