Home > Work > The Moon Is Always Female: Poems
1 " If I die this instant will you be more content with the morning news? Will your coffee taste better? I am not your fate. I am not your government…I am not your mother, not your father or your nightmare or your health. I am not a fence, not a wall. I am not the law or actuarial tables of your insurance broker. I am a woman with my guts loose in my hands, howling and it’s not because I committed hari-kiri. I suggest either you cook me or sew me back up. I suggest you walk into my pain as into the breaking waves of an ocean of blood, and either we will climb out together and walk away. "
― Marge Piercy , The Moon Is Always Female: Poems
2 " A strong woman is a woman in whose head a voice is repeating, I told you so, ugly, bad girl, bitch, nag, shrill, witch, ballbuster, nobody will ever love you back, why aren't you feminine, why aren't you soft, why aren't you quiet, why aren't you dead? A strong woman is a woman determined to do something others are determined not be done. She is pushing up on the bottom of a lead coffin lid. She is trying to raise a manhole cover with her head, she is trying to butt her way through a steel wall. Her head hurts. People waiting for the hole to be made say, hurry, you're so strong. "
3 " Snow lies on my fieldsthough the air is so warm I wantto roll on my back and wriggle.Sure, the dark downhill weep showswho’s winning, and the thatch of tallgrass is sticking out of the banks,but I want to start digging and planting.My swelling hills, my leafbrown loamysoil interlaced with worms red as mouths,my garden,why don’t you hurry upand take your clothes off ? "
4 " To have without holdingLearning to love differently is hard,love with the hands wide open, lovewith the doors banging on their hinges,the cupboard unlocked, the windroaring and whimpering in the roomsrustling the sheets and snapping the blindsthat thwack like rubber bandsin an open palm.It hurts to love wide openstretching the muscles that feelas if they are made of wet plaster,then of blunt knives, thenof sharp knives.It hurts to thwart the reflexesof grab, of clutch ; to love and letgo again and again. It pesters to rememberthe lover who is not in the bed,to hold back what is owed to the workthat gutters like a candle in a cavewithout air, to love consciously,conscientiously, concretely, constructively.I can’t do it, you say it’s killingme, but you thrive, you glowon the street like a neon raspberry,You float and sail, a helium balloonbright bachelor’s button blue and bobbingon the cold and hot winds of our breath,as we make and unmake in passionatediastole and systole the rhythmof our unbound bonding, to haveand not to hold, to lovewith minimized malice, hungerand anger moment by moment balanced. "
5 " All day you have been on my mind, a steam iron pressing the convolutions from my cortex, ironing me flat. Worrying cooks my cells feverish. I am irritable with love boiling into anxiety, till I grow furious with you, lying under the surgeon’s knife. "
6 " I find it easy to admire in trees what depresses me in people. "