What Kinds of Times are These

What Kinds of Times are These

by 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.

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In the late 1930’s, when German poet Bertolt Brecht was living in exile in Denmark, he posed this question What kind of times are these? in a poem titled: To Posterity sometimes translated as To Those Who Come After.  It’s a bitter poem full of foreboding that reflected his deep awareness of the threat ahead and what war would mean. It begins: Truly, I live in the dark ages. He asks:

What times are these, in which
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
For in doing so we maintain our silence about so much wrongdoing!

Half a century later – in 1991 – Adrienne Rich picked up on that question for her own poem of dread and foreboding.

The featured image is a detail from the Canadian artist Emily Carr. Among the Firs 1930’s.