What Kind of Times Are These by Adrienne Rich

What Kind of Times Are These
Adrienne Rich

There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.

I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled
this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.

I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it’s necessary
to talk about trees.

SELECTED BY MANDANA CHAFFA

I find myself walking toward that “place between two strands of trees,” as I re-read Adrienne Rich’s “What Kind of Times Are These, this remarkable poem that exists in a precarious eternal present. The title alone—question as statement—is one I hear everywhere all around me, most of all in my own mind. What kinds of times are these? How do we explicate such devastations and betrayals? How do we survive and persist and resist?

Rich’s striking American poem reminds that language, and our very existence, is political. Whether in secrecy or broadcast to the world, it can be revelatory and revolutionary. Don’t ignore the signs around you. Listen.

ABOUT MANDANA CHAFFA

Mandana Chaffa is a writer, editor and critic whose work has appeared in a variety of publications and anthologies. She founded and is the editor-in-chief of Nowruz Journal, a digital periodical of Persian arts and letters, which was a finalist for the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses’s Firecracker Award for Best Magazine: Debut and is an editor-at-large at Chicago Review of Books. She serves on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, where she is vice president of the Barrios Book in Translation Prize, and is president of the board of The Flow Chart Foundation. Born in Tehran, Iran, she lives in New York.