Among Women by Marie Ponsot

Among Women

What women wander?

Not many. All. A few.

Most would, now & then,

& no wonder.

Some, and I’m one,

Wander sitting still.

My small grandmother

Bought from every peddler

Less for the ribbons and lace

Than for their scent

Of sleep where you will,

Walk out when you want, choose

Your bread and your company.

She warned me, “Have nothing to lose.”

She looked fragile but had

High blood, runner’s ankles,

Could endure, endure.

She loved her rooted garden, her

Grand children, her once

Wild once young man.

Women wander

As best they can.

This Be the Verse by Philip Larkin

This Be the Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   

    They may not mean to, but they do.   

They fill you with the faults they had

    And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn

    By fools in old-style hats and coats,   

Who half the time were soppy-stern

    And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

    It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

    And don’t have any kids yourself.

Charles on Fire by James Merrill

Charles on Fire

Another evening we sprawled about discussing

Appearances. And it was the consensus

That while uncommon physical good looks

Continued to launch one, as before, in life

(Among its vaporous eddies and false claims),

Still, as one of us said into his beard,

"Without your intellectual and spiritual 

Values, man, you are sunk." No one but squared

The shoulders of their own unlovliness.

Long-suffering Charles, having cooked and served the meal,

Now brought out little tumblers finely etched

He filled with amber liquor and then passed.

"Say," said the same young man, "in Paris, France,

They do it this way"--bounding to his feet

And touching a lit match to our host's full glass.

A blue flame, gentle, beautiful, came, went

Above the surface. In a hush that fell

We heard the vessel crack. The contents drained

As who should step down from a crystal coach.

Steward of spirits, Charles's glistening hand

All at once gloved itself in eeriness.

The moment passed. He made two quick sweeps and

Was flesh again. "It couldn't matter less,"

He said, but with a shocked, unconscious glance

Into the mirror. Finding nothing changed,

He filled a fresh glass and sank down among us.

A Book Full of Pictures by Charles Simić

A Book Full of Pictures

Father studied theology through the mail

And this was exam time.

Mother knitted. I sat quietly with a book

Full of pictures. Night fell.

My hands grew cold touching the faces

Of dead kings and queens.

There was a black raincoat in the upstairs bedroom

Swaying from the ceiling,

But what was it doing there?

Mother's long needles made quick crosses.

They were black

Like the inside of my head just then.

The pages I turned sounded like wings.

"The soul is a bird," he once said.

In my book full of pictures

A battle raged: lances and swords

Made a kind of wintry forest

With my heart spiked and bleeding in its branches. 

One Way of Doing Battle by Lisa Ciccarello

One Way of Doing Battle

When I touched my wrist to my chest
it was shorthand for love.

When I returned & the house was empty

I carried his body with me.

I burnt the ship to make the sword. I burnt
the sail to send the dead.

That was one way of doing battle.

Do you think I spent all this time with the hammer
just to drink at the well?

No.

I want to hold the neck of this flower until its
animal comes out.

There is nothing left of my home
so I carry my home with me

until I get another son.

A boy who sheared his hair
& stood before me.

Do you think I spent all this time with the blood in the barn
& the meat on the spit

with the horses’ thunder-black eyes
& foaming mouths

to get behind you? No.

One way of doing battle is to do nothing at all.

I lit the beacon

though I never planned to return.

This is the home I know now, the broad blade
the hewn post, barriers in place of a plain.

The axe in the dirt. The bone beneath.

Do you think I spent all this time in the bear-dark forest
in the wing-maze in the trap-howl

in the blade-hunt with the animals stringing up their dead

just to name the moon in the name
of my father?

I want to make this my home. I want

to burn this place & own the ashes of it.

I gave him the knife  

& he belonged to me.

Do you think I spent all this time with the bone-stilled body
in the stone bed

growing the great rope of my hair
moving from shield to shield

just to take your hand in marriage?

To have the chain
but not the charm?

I want to shut your mouth
with my fingers

& your eyes with my hammer.

You touch the metal blade to your metal sleeve,

but your neck is a village without a gate.

Do you think I spent all this time with the sword
just to be a simple daughter?

Beneath my bed I dig a trench.

I want to burn my enemy with the oil & torch

but when he fails to die in the fire
he comes back up burning.

This is no way to raise a child.

As I Grew Older by Langston Hughes

As I Grew Older

It was a long time ago.

I have almost forgotten my dream.

But it was there then,

In front of me,

Bright like a sun--

My dream.

And then the wall rose,

Rose slowly,

Slowly,

Between me and my dream.

Rose until it touched the sky--

The wall.

Shadow.

I am black.

I lie down in the shadow.

No longer the light of my dream before me,

Above me.

Only the thick wall.

Only the shadow.

My hands!

My dark hands!

Break through the wall!

Find my dream!

Help me to shatter this darkness,

To smash this night,

To break this shadow

Into a thousand lights of sun,

Into a thousand whirling dreams

Of sun! 

Proposal by Fady Joudah

Proposal 

I think of god as a little bird who takes

To staying close to the earth,

The destiny of little wings

To exaggerate the wind

And peck the ground.

I see Haifa

By my father and your father’s sea,

The sea with little living in it,

Fished out like a land.

I think of a little song and

How there must be a tree.

I choose the sycamore

I saw split in two

Minaret trunks on the way

To a stone village, in a stone-thrower mountain.

Were the villagers wrong to love

Their donkeys and wheat for so long,

To sing to the good stranger

Their departure song?

I think of the tree that is a circle

In a straight line, future and past.

I wait for the wind to send 

God down, I become ready for song.

I sing, in a tongue not my own:

We left our shoes behind and fled.

We left our scent in them

Then bled out our soles.

We left our mice and lizards 

There in our kitchens and on the walls.

But they crossed the desert after us,

Some found our feet in the sand and slept,

Some homed in on us like pigeons,

Then built their towers in a city coffin for us . . .

I will probably visit you there after Haifa.

A little bird to exaggerate the wind

And lick the salt off the sea of my wings. I think

God reels the earth in when the sky rains

Like fish on a wire.

And the sea, each time it reaches the shore,

Becomes a bird to see of the land 

What it otherwise wouldn’t.

And the wind through the trees

Is the sea coming home.