The Seven Of Pentacles by Marge Piercy
Under a sky the color of pea soup she is looking at her work growing away there actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans as things grow in the real world, slowly enough. If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water, if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter […]
The Past is the Present by Marianne Moore
If external action is effete and rhyme is outmoded, I shall revert to you, Habakkuk, as when in a Bible class the teacher was speaking of unrhymed verse. He said; and I think I repeat his exact words; “Hebrew poetry is prose with a sort of heightened consciousness.” Ecstasy affords the occasion and expediency determines […]
The Paper Nautilus by Marianne Moore
For authorities whose hopes are shaped by mercenaries? Writers entrapped by teatime fame and by commuters’ comforts? Not for these the paper nautilus constructs her thin glass shell. Giving her perishable souvenir of hope, a dull white outside and smooth- edged inner surface glossy as the sea, the watchful maker of it guards it day […]
The Pangolin by Marianne Moore
Another armored animal–scale lapping scale with spruce-cone regularity until they form the uninterrupted central tail-row! This near artichoke with head and legs and grit-equipped gizzard, the night miniature artist engineer is, yes, Leonardo da Vinci’s replica– impressive animal and toiler of whom we seldom hear. Armor seems extra. But for him, the closing ear-ridge– or […]
The Neighbor by Marge Piercy
Man stomping over my bed in boots carrying a large bronze church bell which you occasionally drop: gross man with iron heels who drags coffins to and fro at four in the morning, who hammers on scaffolding all night long, who entertains sumo wrestlers and fat acrobats– I pass you on the steps, we smile […]
The Morning Half-Life Blues by Marge Piercy
Girls buck the wind in the grooves toward work in fuzzy coats promised to be warm as fur. The shop windows snicker flashing them hurrying over dresses they cannot afford: you are not pretty enough, not pretty enough. Blown with yesterday’s papers through the boiled coffee morning we dream of the stop on the subway […]
The Moment I knew my Life had Changed by Maria Mazziotti Gillan
It was not until later that I knew, recognized the moment for what it was, my life before it, a gray landscape, shapeless and misty; my life after, flowering full and leafy as the cherry trees that only today have torn into bloom. Imagine: my cousin at 19, tall, slender. She worked in New York […]
The Friend by Marge Piercy
We sat across the table. he said, cut off your hands. they are always poking at things. they might touch me. I said yes. Food grew cold on the table. he said, burn your body. it is not clean and smells like sex. it rubs my mind sore. I said yes. I love you, I […]
The Fish by Marianne Moore
wade through black jade. Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps adjusting the ash-heaps; opening and shutting itself like an injured fan. The barnacles which encrust the side of the wave, cannot hide there for the submerged shafts of the sun, split like spun glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness into the crevices— in and out, […]
The Dark Cavalier by Margaret Widdemer
The Dark Cavalier by Margaret Widdemer I am the Dark Cavalier; I am the Last Lover: My arms shall welcome you when other arms are tired; I stand to wait for you, patient in the darkness, Offering forgetfulness of all that you desired. I ask no merriment, no pretense of gladness, I can love heavy […]
The Colloquy Beneath by Margaret Marie Hubbard
The impetus of delirium, drills deep into my brain. The drifting shadow provokes, my opulence to strain. Impetuous choice of words, befuddle all mankind. Disentangle my intent, of the colloquy beneath the rhyme. Incontrovertibly I say to thee, I know thy true intent. Entrée oh aberration, because my mind is spent! Copyright ©: Margaret Marie […]
The Cat’s Song by Marge Piercy
Mine, says the cat, putting out his paw of darkness. My lover, my friend, my slave, my toy, says the cat making on your chest his gesture of drawing milk from his mother’s forgotten breasts. Let us walk in the woods, says the cat. I’ll teach you to read the tabloid of scents, to fade […]
The Campera, the Foreigner y el Novio by Marjorie Kanter
The Campera, the Foreigner y el Novio by Marjorie Kanter I was with him when she asked me if I had the same moon where I was from. I said yes and she said how romantic. End of the poem 15 random poems Poetry by subject Some external links: The Bat’s Own Poetry Cave […]
The Boy by Marilyn Hacker
The Boy by Marilyn Hacker It is the boy in me who’s looking out the window, while someone across the street mends a pillowcase, clouds shift, the gutter spout pours rain, someone else lights a cigarette? (Because he flinched, because he didn’t whirl around, face them, because he didn’t hurl the challenge back—”Fascists?”—not “Faggots”—Swine! he […]
The Aegean by Maria Luisa Spaziani
The Aegean by Maria Luisa Spaziani This music has lasted since the world began. A rock was born among the waters while tiny waves chatted in a soft universal tongue. The shell of a se-turtle would not have foretold the guitar. Your music has always risen to the sky, green taproot, Mother Sea, first of […]
The Gate by Marie Howe
The Gate by Marie Howe I had no idea that the gate I would step through to finally enter this world would be the space my brother’s body made. He was a little taller than me: a young man but grown, himself by then, done at twenty-eight, having folded every sheet, rinsed every glass he […]
The Copper Beech by Marie Howe
The Copper Beech by Marie Howe Immense, entirely itself, it wore that yard like a dress, with limbs low enough for me to enter it and climb the crooked ladder to where I could lean against the trunk and practice being alone. One day, I heard the sound before I saw it, rain fell darkening […]
Synchronicity by Marina Cecilia Kohon
I The lights from the past have turned acephalous II They trigger images that should be forgotten III Evanescent breath from a freeze frame without bar codes IV They get welded on the chest with wave synchronicity V Mock at the singularity of the moment and bifurcations of the road VI And stamp your impassive […]
Subjective Genocide by Marie Starr
Why is it you can buy your kids buckets of Cowboys and Indians to play with? But you could never, would never, even if you could, buy them buckets of Jews and Nazis, of Serbs and Croatians, of Tutsi and Hutu. Copyright ©: 2003 End of the poem 15 random poems Poetry by subject […]
Subject to Change by Marilyn L. Taylor
They are so beautiful, and so very young they seem almost to glitter with perfection, these creatures that I briefly move among. I never get to stay with them for long, but even so, I view them with affection: they are so beautiful, and so very young. Poised or clumsy, placid or high-strung, they’re expert […]
Spenser’s Ireland by Marianne Moore
has not altered;– a place as kind as it is green, the greenest place I’ve never seen. Every name is a tune. Denunciations do not affect the culprit; nor blows, but it is torture to him to not be spoken to. They’re natural,– the coat, like Venus’ mantle lined with stars, buttoned close at the […]
Song by Margaret Widdemer
Song by Margaret Widdemer The Spring will come when the year turns, As if no Winter had been, But what shall I do with a locked heart That lets no new year in? The birds will go when the Fall goes, The leaves will fade in the field, But what shall I do with an […]
Silence by Marianne Moore
My father used to say, “Superior people never make long visits, have to be shown Longfellow’s grave nor the glass flowers at Harvard. Self reliant like the cat — that takes its prey to privacy, the mouse’s limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth — they sometimes enjoy solitude, and can be robbed […]
Scars on Paper by Marilyn Hacker
Scars on Paper by Marilyn Hacker An unwrapped icon, too potent to touch, she freed my breasts from the camp Empire dress. Now one of them’s the shadow of a breast with a lost object’s half-life, with as much life as an anecdotal photograph: me, Kim and Iva, all stripped to the waist, hiking near […]
Rosemary by Marianne Moore
Beauty and Beauty’s son and rosemary; Venus and Love, her son, to speak plainly – born of the sea supposedly, at Christmas each, in company, braids a garland of festivity. Not always rosemary; since the flight to Egypt, blooming indifferently. With lancelike leaf, green but silver underneath, its flowers; white originally; turned blue. The herb […]
Release by Marie Starr
unglue your tongue talk to wind … talk to trees … talk to streams flowing over pebbles … talk to single blades of grass … talk to me … say anything … say everything … say nothing at all … just turn your head toward the sound of sunlight … rest your eyes on the […]
Reading Runes by Marina Cecilia Kohon
I The Oracle foresees: Dreams demand a truce. II Love is an ivy plant that demands, The rebellion will lit up the fire (it’s that my voices have gotten tired) III Your adaptability will undo the charms Look for shelter in the white sheets (but my hands bleed without the verses) IV Go back to […]
Portrait in Black and White by Marjorie Kanter
a fly is standing at the bar on a lady in a white dress, drinking. End of the poem 15 random poems Poetry by subject Some external links: The Bat’s Own Poetry Cave Talking Writing Monster. Duckduckgo.com – the alternative in the US Quant.com – a search engine from France, and also an alternative, […]
Poetry by Marianne Moore
I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it after all, a place for the genuine. Hands that can grasp, eyes that can dilate, hair that can rise if it must, these things are important not because […]
Peter by Marianne Moore
Strong and slippery, built for the midnight grass-party confronted by four cats, he sleeps his time away– the detached first claw on the foreleg corresponding to the thumb, retracted to its tip; the small tuft of fronds or katydid-legs above each eye numbering all units in each group; the shadbones regularly set about the mouth […]
Passion by Sera Jacob
What I chose among the pearls, Where I stopped by the horizon, Why I paused to look at the roaring waves, When the raindrops kissed my cheek, Soil succumbed the shells turning grey, Debris waltzed beneath the moisture, Letting sands tick-tock the beat, Rapt droplets on the petals glistened, Leaves were strewn over the trodden […]
Paragraphs from a Day-Book by Marilyn Hacker
Paragraphs from a Day-Book by Marilyn Hacker Cherry-ripe: dark sweet burlats, scarlet reverchons firm-fleshed and tart in the mouth bigarreaux, peach-and-white napoléons as the harvest moves north from Provence to the banks of the Yonne (they grow napoléons in Washington State now). Before that, garriguettes, from Périgord, in wooden punnets afterwards, peaches: yellow-fleshed, white, moss-skinned […]
Not out of the running by Margaret Marie Hubbard
Beat down pushed around don’t count me out of the running not till the final call Cut and bled left for dead don’t count me out of the running not till the curtains fall If you thought for a single moment that I forgot your face If you thought about that moment when I left […]
Nevertheless by Marianne Moore
you’ve seen a strawberry that’s had a struggle; yet was, where the fragments met, a hedgehog or a star- fish for the multitude of seeds. What better food than apple seeds; the fruit within the fruit; locked in like counter-curved twin hazelnuts? Frost that kills the little rubber-plant – leaves of kok-sagyyz-stalks, can’t harm the […]
Nearly A Valediction by Marilyn Hacker
Nearly A Valediction by Marilyn Hacker You happened to me. I was happened to like an abandoned building by a bull- dozer, like the van that missed my skull happened a two-inch gash across my chin. You were as deep down as I’ve ever been. You were inside me like my pulse. A new- born […]
My Mother’s Body by Marge Piercy
1. The dark socket of the year the pit, the cave where the sun lies down and threatens never to rise, when despair descends softly as the snow covering all paths and choking roads: then hawkfaced pain seized you threw you so you fell with a sharp cry, a knife tearing a bolt of silk. […]
My Daughter at 14, Christmas Dance, 1981 by Maria Mazziotti Gillan
Panic in your face, you write questions to ask him. When he arrives, you are serene, your fear unbetrayed. How unlike me you are. After the dance, I see your happiness; he holds your hand. Though you barely speak, your body pulses messages I can read all too well. He kisses you goodnight, his body […]
Morning News by Marilyn Hacker
Morning News by Marilyn Hacker Spring wafts up the smell of bus exhaust, of bread and fried potatoes, tips green on the branches, repeats old news: arrogance, ignorance, war. A cinder-block wall shared by two houses is new rubble. On one side was a kitchen sink and a cupboard, on the other was a bed, […]
Love Poem to My Husband of Thirty-one Years by Maria Mazziotti Gillan
I watch you walk up our front path, the entire right side of your body, stiff and unbending, your leg, dragging on the ground, your arm not moving. Six different times you ask me the date of our daughter’s wedding, seem surprised each time, forget who called, though you can name obscure desert animals, and […]
Locked Away by Margaret Marie Hubbard
I sail this sea that has bequeathed my mind upon this wooden door, still throughout time. The lymerics and lyrics lap at my feet as I reach for the note my fingertips meet. “Within the pocket lies the unlocking key.” I look in the hole and see only me. Perhaps I’ll unleash this ocean someday […]