A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far by Adrienne Rich

I have divvied up the cleaning so I do a third of this little unit each day along with the regular kitchen cleaning plus the daily heap of hand towels etc which have to be washed and hung out. I can walk around the little front lawn, ignore the apples all over the ground, because if I lean down to pick them up I’ll probably fall over. I see people walking or cycling past, someone pushing a pram. If at first some of them didn’t seem to be on my wavelength, I just exercised some wild patience and gave them a second read. In the mid-1970s though, feminist poetry, song lyrics, novels, nonfiction, plus Broadsheet magazine, came on the scene and I gave poetry another go. It seemed to be written for well-educated people who understood the images and ideas, who wrote about form and stanza (what the fuck did they mean?), had never in their nice middle-class lives known what it was like to be hungry and cold. Up till 1979 I hadn’t felt much connection with poetry. What I had to do was exercise some patience and keep looking and reading and eventually I’d find poets who spoke my language. What Aorewa (and Adrienne) did for me was introduce me to poetry that reflected my thoughts, experiences and ideas, gave me new ones. It was a great paper and she was a great teacher. I was first introduced to Adrienne Rich’s work in 1979 when I did a paper called 20 th Century Women’s Literature, taught by Aorewa McLeod at the University of Auckland.

I have no idea what my hair looks like, probably a good thing, but it feels great. As far as I could tell it matched the size of the lock I’d already chopped off. I felt the other side, sort of measured it in my head, and hacked that chunk off. I thought to hell with it, shut my eyes, grabbed a piece and cut it off.

I can’t see my face in the mirror, just a sort of ghostly presence, but the other day I thought bugger this, I’m sick of always pushing my hair back so I washed it, put the mirror on the kitchen bench where two windows and the new expensive ceiling light were not quite enough to see clearly.

A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far by Adrienne Rich