womanly poems for womanly women

[eagleyez]

Yes, I do. He's the tenderest vittle I know. Why do you think I'm so nutty over him? I don't know what he's on about with the fem jeans though. They're just Levi's for god's sake.

perhaps I referenced the fact that my clothes hang on me like PJ's. And we both know who wears the PJ's in this household.

i need to eat more bread er somethin.



Thanks eve, just prattling at my desk which sits adjacent to the steamy bathroom.
Its like a lavender smudge ritual each time she exits the shower, not that Im complainin, mind you.

 

[WickedEve]

perhaps I referenced the fact that my clothes hang on me like PJ's. And we both know who wears the PJ's in this household.

i need to eat more bread er somethin.



Thanks eve, just prattling at my desk which sits adjacent to the steamy bathroom.
Its like a lavender smudge ritual each time she exits the shower, not that Im complainin, mind you.

I'm sending you a bucket of gravy.

 

[Angeline]

dear seattle,
your breasts
stretch my sweaters
leaving boob shadows
where my chest should be
wear your own
damn
clothes

love,
your husband



I think that my womanly poem up there was actually pretty masculine. Let me find something softer, like


bows and flows of angel hair
and ice cream castles in the air

I'm a big Joni Mitchell fan, though that's not one of my favorites.

Actually, I was originally going to post Lady Lazarus in this thread, but it's more monsterly than womanly.

Lady Lazarus
Sylvia Plath

I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it----

A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot

A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin
0 my enemy.
Do I terrify?----

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me

And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.

The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut

As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else,
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.

It's easy enough to do it in a cell.
It's easy enough to do it and stay put.
It's the theatrical

Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:

'A miracle!'
That knocks me out.
There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart----
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash ---
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there----

A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

 

[Angeline]

I'm sending you a bucket of gravy.

I'm wearing lavender pjs right now.

 

[eagleyez]

I'm sending you a bucket of gravy.

Squirells and Armadillos I hope.

Dip my muffin in some Southern Stew.

Twon't be long ya know.

 

[jthserra]

Eavan Boland

Mastectomy

My ears heard
their words.
I didn't believe them.

No, even through my tears
they couldn't deceive me.
Even so

I could see
through them
to the years

opening
their arteries
fields gulching

into trenches
cuirasses stenching
a mulch of heads

and towns
as prone
to bladed men

as women.
How well
I recognized

the specialist
freshing death
across his desk,

the surgeon,
blade-handed,
standing there

urging patience.
How well
they have succeeded!

I have stopped bleeding
I look down.
It has gone.
So they have taken off
what slaked them first,
what they have hated since:

blue-veined
white-domed
home

of wonder
and the wetness
of their dreams

I flatten
to their looting
to the sleight

of their plunder.
I am a brute site.
Theirs is the true booty.



from Eavan Boland's book In Her Own Image

jthserra

 

[Angeline]

Written by a Man

but I find this lyric (yes lyric) to be a profound statement on women.


Jezebel
Iron & Wine

Who's seen Jezebel?
She was born to be the woman I would know
And hold like the breeze
Half as tight as both eyes closed

And who's seen Jezebel?
She went walking where the sea does line the road
Her blouse on the ground
Where the dogs were hungry, roaming

Saying, "wait, we swear
We'll love you more and wholly
Jezebel, it's we that you are for
Only"

Who's seen Jezebel?
She was born to be the woman we could blame
Make me a beast half as brave
I'd be the same

Who's seen jezebel?
She was gone before I ever got to say
"Lay here my love
You're the only shape I'll pray to, Jezebel"

Who's seen Jezebel?
Will the mountain last as long as I can wait
Wait like the dawn
How it aches to meet the day

Who's seen Jezebel?
She was certainly the spark for all I've done
The window was wide
She could see the dogs come running

Saying, "wait, we swear
We'll love you more and wholly
Jezebel, it's we that you are for
Only"

 

[eagleyez]

high above her timberline

shale fields,
obsidian mounds.

I have climbed many mountains
Westerly's
she fears that those
Boot feet idle,

but when we sit around the
talking table
legs crossed and swinging,
electric eyes
reveal all disguise,

I scant all appetites
But the one,
Weak as the Bull that I was born become-
I will pledge to alay your fear
High above the tree line
you will not find me undone.

 

[Tzara]

Lady Lazarus
Sylvia Plath

Ah, St. Sylvia! God, but I love her.

I've always liked this one:

Morning Song

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.​

There are so many things I love about this poem that I would grossly expose my silly simple self in recounting them.

Ack.

 

[PatCarrington]

how anyone can not adore Sylvia Plath's poetry is beyond me.


Mirror

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see, I swallow immediately.
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike
I am not cruel, only truthful –
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me.
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

 

[eagleyez]

how anyone can not adore Sylvia Plath's poetry is beyond me.


Mirror

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see, I swallow immediately.
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike
I am not cruel, only truthful –
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me.
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

nice poem Pat.

 

[CharleyH]

Since we have a manly poems for manly men thread...


wishes for sons - Lucille Clifton


i wish them cramps.
i wish them a strange town
and the last tampon.
i wish them no 7-11.

i wish them one week early
and wearing a white skirt.
i wish them one week late.

later i wish them hot flashes
and clots like you
wouldn't believe. let the
flashes come when they
meet someone special.
let the clots come
when they want to.

let them think they have accepted
arrogance in the universe,
then bring them to gynecologists
not unlike themselves.

LOL I definately have ... Very tongue in cheek, Wicked. Fun and funny.

 

[Angeline]

It's the height of conceit

to put one's own poem in the thread (well my boyfriend did, but they're about me so that's perfectly ok ), but since we're worshipping Sylvia, I wrote this poem about her a few years ago. I think it needs a good edit, but you get the idea.

Another Kitchen God’s Wife
by Me

Let dead icons rest.
Let them sleep.

Stop parading these women
through journals and dissertations,
dragging their intimate kitchen moments
through poetic seminars of apologia.

Their bones are swabbed clean.
They are analyzed to transparency,
the point of their return vanished
in the smoky landscape
of modern gender studies.

See Sylvia inherit the literary mantle
of cryogenics.
See her forever frozen in her kitchen,
first a bell jar, then a funeral urn,
and now fully trivialized, you too,
gentle reader, can own her.

The Women Writers' Snow Globe series
is this year focused on tragedians,
interpreted by academic minds
in ivy-league boots of the highest degree.

Sylvia is suitable for display at home,
forever set on your mantelpiece
on a post-feminist pedestal,
a monumental maid of constant sorrow
enclosed in a predawn tableau
bereft of sound but sunk
in a cacophony of anguish.

Shake it at 4 am and the pen moves.
Shake it at 6 am and babies cry.

Why must Sylvia endlessly end herself
for you or me to justify our means?
She is not, we are not, woman is not
Ho or Madonna, bitch slut mommy,
dyke or courtesan, or even Magdalene.

We can’t be owned by buying us
with sparkle or cheap flash
or even forced soulless into a bed,
made the centerfold of a magazine
or the centerpiece of your fantasy,
shot with botox, swaddled in spandex,
painted and crowned Queen of pawns
in your mean-spirited chess game,
or sucked up and glibly swallowed,
only to tumble in open-thighed alarums,
like a cheap prize from a slot machine,
spattered with your sicked-up revenge
against someone,
someone,
not me.

I didn't rip up the flowers
that destroyed your beautiful garden.
I didn’t turn you to stone
with one look, sway you
with sea cries and wiles,
only to crash you under waves,
I didn't deny you by turning
to salt, desiccated by my own desire

I'm me. I’m human,
and Sylvia is so tired.
Let me take her home now,
perchance to sleep.

 

[BooMerengue]

I'm glad you posted that, Ange. And I like it a lot. Mostly for reminding me of something I so often remind others...

"She is not, we are not, woman is not
Ho or Madonna, bitch slut mommy,
dyke or courtesan, or even Magdalene."

I have a Puritanical streak that I have come by honestly and am not ashamed of, but it does cause my pot soaked brain some grief sometimes. Earlier I saw some one say St Sylvia and my very first unbidden thought was "How do you reconcile motherhood with a vision of her head in the stove? I mean, like, isn't that major abandonment?"

But you did it nicely. We are NOT stereotyped, and won't be. To me poetry is a sideline thing I do cuz this addled broad I met here said I could, but the thing I am most proud of is raising my daughter. For Sylvia expressing herself in writing was first and foremost. And thats ok. I just tend to be too simplistic sometimes.

Thank you for so nicely kicking my ass. You do it well.

 

[twelveoone]

how anyone can not adore Sylvia Plath's poetry is beyond me.

Never knew you had it in you. Now, I'm not sure what. Excessive statement?

 

[bogusbrig]

I couldn't help but notice how many of these poems are about bitching at men or women bleating on about their own suffering. At least the manly poems bleat on about romanticism or futility, the world beyond themselves.

*BB hides behind his desk as he waits to duck the first frying pan to be thrown at him by a frustrated housewife who is sick of being taken for granted.*

 

[Angeline]

I'm glad you posted that, Ange. And I like it a lot. Mostly for reminding me of something I so often remind others...

"She is not, we are not, woman is not
Ho or Madonna, bitch slut mommy,
dyke or courtesan, or even Magdalene."

I have a Puritanical streak that I have come by honestly and am not ashamed of, but it does cause my pot soaked brain some grief sometimes. Earlier I saw some one say St Sylvia and my very first unbidden thought was "How do you reconcile motherhood with a vision of her head in the stove? I mean, like, isn't that major abandonment?"

But you did it nicely. We are NOT stereotyped, and won't be. To me poetry is a sideline thing I do cuz this addled broad I met here said I could, but the thing I am most proud of is raising my daughter. For Sylvia expressing herself in writing was first and foremost. And thats ok. I just tend to be too simplistic sometimes.

Thank you for so nicely kicking my ass. You do it well.

Thanks, and I certainly meant no slur to Tzara or Pat: I love her, too. In my mind Yeats is a saint (deal with it Bogusbrig ), and of course he was only human--not an icon for whatever. I think at the time I wrote that poem I was on some jag about women and stereotypes and was reading something about that in relation to her and out came the poem.

I was um extrapolating.

 

[bogusbrig]

how anyone can not adore Sylvia Plath's poetry is beyond me.

Nope, never saw anything that special in her. Never quite got into her pathetic self destruction and feminists promotion of her into a martyrdom cult.

Dying young didn't do her poetry any harm. Like all artists who die young, they don't have time to fuck up or bore the world with over production.

 

[bogusbrig]

(deal with it Bogusbrig ),

Unfortunately I have to deal with it every day.

Oh the woes of life.

 

[flyguy69]

how anyone can not adore Sylvia Plath's poetry is beyond me...

You mean Sylvia Hughes!

And her poetry is some of the most beautiful I have read. Frankly, Ted is pretty good, too, but his is not in her league.

 

[bogusbrig]

You mean Sylvia Hughes!

And her poetry is some of the most beautiful I have read. Frankly, Ted is pretty good, too, but his is not in her league.

He's better and deals with life beyond the navel.

 

[Sabina_Tolchovsky]

so why is it that so many femmes du jour feel that need to stand on the bones of man (no pun intended) to justify their postion as strong women?
I know I am strong...I don't need to tear down every man around me to feel this way.
For every woman who is tired of feeling weak there is a man that is tired of putting on the persona of strength...equality is what we should be spreading, instead the balance becomes distorted because women feel wronged for past transgresions...reversed bigotry?

 

[flyguy69]

He's better and deals with life beyond the navel.

Is life beyond the navel more important than life behind it? I won't say his work is poor or uninteresting because it is not, but I find her work cow-heavy with insight!

 

[PatCarrington]

Is life beyond the navel more important than life behind it? I won't say his work is poor or uninteresting because it is not, but I find her work cow-heavy with insight!

i think he's good.

i also think she dwarfs him.

but she dwarfs just about everyone, it seems to me.

and i bet her navel was delicious.

 

[flyguy69]

Here is the Suzanne Lummis poem I was looking for yesterday.

Femme Fatale
by Suzanne Lummis

It’s a crime story she’s in:
betrayal and larceny, few clues.
Someone stole what she lived for,
made off like a thief in the night
or high noon. What shall she do?
Put a heel on each foot and set out,
making a snapping sound as she steps.
The man she love smiles
from a drugstore’s rack
of magazines, just in.
Looks like he’s wrapped his movie,
dropped his wife on a Frisian Island
and is flying his girlfriend to St. Tropez.
The men who love her finger coins
in the stale linings of their front
pockets and whimper what’s your name?
The job she wanted went
to the man who tells the truth
from one side of his mouth, lies
from the other: a bilingual.
The job she got lets her
answer the questioning phone all day.
Her disappointment has appetite,
gravity. Fall in, you’ll be crunched
and munched, stretched
thin as Fettuccine. Watch out for her,
this woman, there is more than one.

That woman with you, for instance,
checking herself in the mirror
to see where she stands—
she’s innocent so far, but someone
will disappoint her.
Even now you’re beginning to.
Even now you’re in danger.




From her book In Danger