Poetry Friday - Adrienne Rich

From 21 Love Poems...

VII
What kind of beast would turn its life into words?
What atonement is this all about?
- and yet, writing words like these, I'm also living.
Is all this close to the wolverine's howled signals,
that modulated cantana of the wild?
or, when away from you I try to create you in words,
am I simply using you, like a river or a war?
And how have I used rivers, how have I used wars
to escape writing of the worst thing of all -
not the crimes of others, not even our own death,
but the failure to want our own freedom passionately enough
so that blighted elms, sick rivers, massacres would seem
mere emblems of that desecration of ourselves?