The speaker here has no ego boundaries which separate “me” from “us” from “them,” fortifying her empathetic voice with sincerity. As the poem goes on, the speaker continues to address the you “who haven’t yet put in a word,” which leads the readers to reflect on whether they have themselves spoken out against oppression, or whether theirs is the “body sheathed in indifference” (p. 37). “From Sickbed Shores” is a strong call for each one of us to feel the plight of the oppressed and speak out against their victimization.

Rich presents a full spectrum of oppressive social and political forces throughout the book, a collective list which crystallizes in the poem “Ballade of the Poverties.” The visually specific images of poverty in its many forms are what anchor the impact of the poem. It begins

Each and every poverty named in the two-page poem is described with a single heartbreaking and/or stomach-turning image. Rich compounds the emotional difficulty of these lines with the literal difficulty of reading them: the awkward syntax of lines such as “The poverty of to steal” or “The poverty of to mouth” makes the reader stumble, and this stumbling is emphasized by the interspersal of smooth lyrical lines such as “Princes of predation let me tell you / There are poverties and there are poverties.” As she does in “From Sickbed Shores,” Rich is bringing the reader face-to-face with desperate social and political problems currently in need of people who will dedicate themselves to finding solutions. Her poems give us no room to turn away, and this is precisely the point, because the fact of the matter is that too many people generally do.

“Scenes of Negotiation” is a poem that figures protesters who do dedicate themselves to the fight against oppression, and are imprisoned for it:

The “you” whose activism is collectively questioned in “From Sickbed Shores” are here the imprisoned protesters whom the speaker identifies as “what or who you chose or became.” The question of choice in identity is one which has fascinated Rich for many years. People oppressed due to issues such as gender, race, poverty, or politics do not have a full range of choices regarding their identity, and there are extenuating factors that narrow the identity choices many non-oppressed people have. How do we choose our identity? Speakers in Rich poems preceding Tonight No Poetry Will Serve annunciate this lack of choice: the speaker of “The Roofwalker” (in Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law) says “A life I didn’t choose / chose me.” The speaker of “From an Old House in America” (in Poems: Selected and New) says “I never chose this place / yet am now of it.” And, most poignantly, the speaker of “Waking in the Dark” (in Diving into the Wreck) says: