Great Poetry by Women

[Maricel Evasco]

 Share with us favorite women's poetry- straight/bi/lesbian/andro, etc

 

 

[Maricel Evasco]

Eve's Discourse

Today, I brutally greet you
with a grunt
or a kick.
Where are you hiding,
where have you fled with your wild box
full of hearts,
and your stream of gunpowder?
Where are you now;
in the ditch where all dreams are finally tossed,
or in the jungle's spidery web
where fatherless children dangle?

I miss you,
you know I do--
as myself
or the miracles that never happen--
you know I do?
I'd like to entice you with a joy I've never known,
an imprudent affair.

When will you come to me?
I'm anxious to play no games,
to confide to you: "my life"--
to let thunder humble us
to let oranges pale in your hand.
I want to search your depths
and find veils
and smoke,
that will vanish at last in flame.

I love you truly
but innocently
as the transparent enchantress of my thoughts,
but, truly, I don't love you,
though innocently
as the confused angel that I am.
I love you,
but I don't love you.
I gamble with these words
and the winner shall be the liar.
Love!. . .
(What am I saying? I'm mistaken,
because here, I wanted to write, I hate you.)
Why won't you come to me?

How is it possible
you let me pass by without requiting our fire?
How is it possible you're so distant, so paranoid
that you deny me?
You're reading the newspapers
passing through
death
and life.
You're with your problems
of groans and groin,
listless,
humiliated,
entertaining yourself with an aspiration to mourning.
Even though I'm melting you,
even though I insult you,
bring you a wilted hyacinth
approve your melancholy;
call forth the salt of heaven,
stitch you into being:
what?
When are you going to murder me with your spit,
hero?
When are you going to overwhelm me again beneath the rain?
When?
When are you going to call me your little bird,
your whore?
When are you going to profane me?
When?
Beware time that passes,
time,
time!
Not even your ghosts appear to me now,
and I no longer understand umbrellas?
Every day, I become more honest with myself,
magnificently noble. . .
If you delay,
if you hesitate and don't search for me,
you'll be blinded;
if you don't return now,
infidel, idiot, dummy, fool,
I'll count myself nothing.

Yesterday, I dreamt that while we were kissing,
a shooting star exploded
and neither of us gave up hope.

This love of ours
belongs to no one;
We found it lost,
stranded
in the street.
Between us we saved it, sheltered it.
Because of that, when we swallow each other
in the night,
I feel like a frightened mother left
alone.
It doesn't matter,
kiss me again and over again
to come to me.
Press yourself against my waist,
come to me again;
be my warm animal again,
move me, again.
I'll purify my leftover life,
the lives of condemned children.

We'll sleep like murderers
who've saved themselves
by bonding together in incomparable blossoming.
And in the morning when the rooster crows,
we will be nature, herself.
I'll appear like your child asleep in her cradle.

Come back to me, come back,
penetrate me with lightening,
Bend me to your will.
We'll turn the record player on forever.
Bring me that unfaithful nape of your neck,
the blow of your stone.
Show me I haven't died,
my love, and I promise you the apple.

Carilda Oliver Labra

http://judithpordon.tripod.com/poetry/carilda_oliver_labra_eves_dis...

[Angharad]

Another wonderful topic, Maricel! I have poetry books tumbled all about my desk....

Here's one by Audre Lorde:

Echo

I hear myself drought caught
Pleading a windy cause
Dry as the earth without rain
Crying love, in tongues of false thunder
While my love waits
Like a seeded trap in the door of my house
Mouth bound with perfect teeth
Sure of their strength on bone
While my love waits
To swallow me whole
And pass me as echos of shadowless laughter
Quiet
My love
Waits at the door of my house.

In my yard myths of rain
Hang like a sheet of brick-caught silk
Torn in the sun.

[Maricel Evasco]

nice.....    Who is Audre Lorde?

[Angharad]

Lorde was a Caribbean-American writer, poet and activist, who called herself a "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet." I became familiar with her in the 70s when she taught at Howard University in Washington DC.

Unfortunately, she died too early...in 1992 at the age of 58...after struggling with breast cancer for 14 years. Sad, but she left a wonderful legacy.

[Quinn]

Amy Lowell:

 

“A Decade”

When you came, you were like red wine and honey,
And the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness.
Now you are like morning bread,
Smooth and pleasant.
I hardly taste you at all for I know your savour,
But I am completely nourished.

[Maricel Evasco]

I love this poem.

[funesthememorious]

Ursula K. Le Guin has been one of my favorite science fiction writers, but she is also a fantastic poet.

 

                                                                    The Vigil for Ben Linder

Ben Linder's family lived just up the street, and our children went to school together. In his twenties, Ben went to Nicaragua to work as an engineer in a volunteer group bringing electric power to villages. He was the first American killed by the American-government-supported "contras."

That was twenty years ago. I reprint this poem now in memory of Ben and in sorrow that we must still hold vigils for young people sacrificed to the greed and folly of our government.

This rain among the candle flames under the heavy end of April evening falls so softly on us listening that it dissolves us like salt. A child frets. The grieving over names. The same anger. There are still far countries. Mayday! they signal, it’s sinking, crashing, it’s going down now! Mayday! But it used to mean you went into the garden early, that first morning, to make a posy. for a neighbor’s door, or boldly offered — “These are for your daughter! ”— laughing, because she wasn’t up yet. They were maybe twelve years old. Afterwards they went to different schools. The bringing of light is no simple matter. The offering of flowers is a work of generations. Young men are scattered like salt on a dry ground. Not theirs, not theirs, but ours the brave children who must learn the rules. To bring light to flower in a dark country takes experts in illumination, engineers of radiance. Taken, taken and broken. We are dim circles flickering at nightfall in April in the rain that quickens the odor of flowering trees and the odor of stone. Over us is a dark government. Circles of burning flames, of flowers, of children learning light. Circles of rain on stone and skin. Turning and returning in shaken silence, broken, unbroken. Sorrow is the home country.

This poem appeared first as a broadside for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in 1987, and was reprinted in my Going Out With Peacocks and Other Poems in 1994.

[Angharad]

From Elsa Gidlow:

Love's Acolyte

Many have loved you with lips and fingers
And lain with you till the moon went out;
Many have brought you lover's gifts!
And some have left their dreams on your doorstep.

But I who am youth among your lovers
Come like an acolyte to worship,
My thirsting blood restrained by reverence,
My heart a wordless prayer.

The candles of desire are lighted,
I bow my head, afraid before you
A mendicant who craves your bounty
Ashamed of what small gifts she brings.

[Angharad]

Beautiful.

[Angharad]

Edna St. Vincent Millay

 

To One Who Might Have Borne a Message

Had I know that you were going
I would have given you messages for her,
Now two years dead,
Whom I shall always love.

As it is, should she entreat you how it goes with me,
You must reply: as well as with most, you fancy;
That I love easily, and pass the time.

And she will not know how all day long between
My life and me her shadow intervenes,
A young thin girl,
Wearing a white skirt and a purple sweater
And a narrow pale blue ribbon about her hair.

I used to say to her, "I love you
Because your face is such a pretty colour,
No other reason."
But it was not true

Oh, had I only known that you were going,
I could have given you messages for her!

[Maricel Evasco]

 

One of my favorite Filipino poets shares my surname, but I am not related to her: Marjorie Evasco

 

Elemental - marjorie evasco

There is a season to this ripening
the way sap of tree rises to fulfill fruit of the topmost branch,
or the motion of jasmine climbing trellises
to show off a single blossom at new moon tide
In my garden bamboos arch over patch of grass,
river stones, upturned earth.
Alone where weeds grow wildest, I think:
How the golden skin of mango broke between your teeth;
how you swallowed the seamless sky over Siquijor,
you body becoming an entire land I could intimate black moons from,
taste of earth, rush of river songs, smell of air before rain,
spray of flowers with strange names.
Yes, there is Reason for this ripening.
You are goldened by my tongue.

 

 

 

LA CONDITION HUMAINE

There is a room where a man lies next

To a woman whose shoulders are lit

By morning. He wakes her to drift

Of clouds, wash of skies, drizzle

Of leaves in the air.  “Magritte,”

He says into her ear, tracing 

With a long slender finger,

A frame beyond the windowpane.

 

Another room in another time

Suddenly opens inside her.

She is standing by a window

Before the painting’s expanse of grass,

The cut of dirt road, and on the horizon

A stand of mountains measuring the reach

Of a single aspen. “La Condition Humaine,”

She turns to the man beside her,

 

As if to say she understood how inside

And outside the rooms of love

The landscape was not always seamless;

How, every time she turned her heart

Into an eye to invent with words the true form

Of being, dustmotes were already trapped

In the light of images, like this morning

Vanished fast into another day.

 

In no time they shall each be elsewhere.
 http://marjorieevasco.jimdo.com/

 

[Angharad]

These are WONDERFUL, Maricel!!!! I hadn't known of Marjorie Evasco, and I look forward to reading more.

The tropical images in the first poem take me back to life in the early 1960s in Hawaii...I was fortunate enough to live there then. Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh, I remember the jasmine and the sweet, juicy flesh of the mango..."you are goldened on my tongue"...I can't think of much that's more sensual.

And the second poem...beautiful and poignant, just like La Condition Humaine.