A rose is a rose is a rose

'I learned very young that to be woman in this world meant that you have to have incredibly thick skin, especially if you want to do it in front of people starting at 16.You’ve got to be willing to accept that your existence is a paradox, and that people are always gonna have something to say about the way that you are. A strong woman is characterized by her capacity to still see her divinity after enduring all sorts of emotional and physical abuse from a world that refuses to see her power. A strong woman deserves to be characterized by her willingness to continue to survive through all adversity, her ability to move passed every obstacle thrown her way; every no, every smirk, every dismissal, every questioning, everybody asking her for hers. She should be honored for the grace she exhibits in the face of chaos, when everything falls on her shoulders and she has to explain once again why she’s qualified and equipped to handle it. She should praised for her perseverance, for the centuries she stood at the forefront of innovation and revolution with no chapter in a history book to commemorate. She should be allowed to express and present herself in any way she pleases, without judgement. She should be allowed a podium at the top of the Statue of Liberty to announce what her heart and soul feel, because I know she could change hearts and minds if they just let her speak, if they would just listen for a moment.

We’re brought into this world with an empathy bestowed upon us. Young girls blossoming into our mature bodies before we are even taught to understand it. We’re expected to respect it by what they deem respectable.

We are told to have a strength that is digestible, and ambition that is gentle, a warm smile that is delectable, but I don’t want to be devoured anymore. I’m grateful for a way to make sense of the world around me and why it’s so cruel and unwilling to listen, why we still have to debate and gather to defend our autonomy and worth with anyone at this point, but much less with each other. It’s painful. To the women who have come before us, who have kicked down doors, only to be greeted by another crowd of angry men shouting that it isn’t time yet, we thank you. To be told that it is not convenient enough to be considered equal, to be afforded the same payment for the same job, to be granted the freedom to do and express as we please, with no rule regulation, restriction, or boundary to its acceptability, we thank you for pushing forward anyway. We thank you for uplifting us to the point where we can stand together here today and collectively shout that time is up. To the leaders in all walks of life who have come together around the world to create tangible change; to the interns and the nonprofits who worked tirelessly from the bottom of their hearts; to the speakers, the spectators, awareness spreaders, organizers, healers, mothers, caretakers, teachers, artists, changemakers, and mentors that have taken on more than they can take, we thank you. The way we lead is a special kind of fierce. We know when we need to break silence in difficult moments, and our courage now resonates in the halls of Congress and around the world. It resonates in all the women: Women of color, queer women, women of minorities, indigenous women, trans women, and women from all around the world that have found themselves on the same wavelength of freedom, coming together to nominate each other and uplift one another to positions of power and authority. The amount of change that we have witnessed and are about to continue to see is because of all of us seeing one another, uplifting one another and continuing to move forward."

I love 'Girls are coming out of the woods' - never read that before. Always liked the purple one, though.

As to the title quote, Stein is a writer who intrigues and frustrates me in equal measure. She's a linguistic contortionist. From 'Sacred Emily' ...

Egg in places.
Egg in few insists.
In set a place.
I am not missing.
Who is a permit.
I love honor and obey I do love honor and obey I do.
Melancholy do lip sing.
How old is he. [....]

Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.
Loveliness extreme.
Extra gaiters.
Loveliness extreme.
Sweetest ice-cream.
Page ages page ages page ages.
Wiped Wiped wire wire.
Sweeter than peaches and pears and cream.
Wiped wire wiped wire.
Extra extreme.

There's a little-seen film about her life with Alice B. Toklas, called Waiting for the Moon, which focused on her Paris salon and connections with Picasso et al. She's a fascinating, if something of a 'kooky' writer!

That's wonderful Arabella

Poem by Li Qingzhao (1084-1155)

To The Tune Of Intoxicated Under The Shadow Of Flowers

Light mists and heavy clouds,
melancholy the long dreay day,
In the golden censer the burning incense is dying away.
It is again time for the lovely Double-Ninth Festival;
The coolness of midnight penetrates my screen of sheer silk
and chills my pillow of jade.
After drinking wine at twilight under the chrysanthemum hedge,
My sleeves are perfumed by the faint fragrance of the plants.
Oh, I cannot say it is not enchanting,
Only, when the west wind stirs the curtain,
I see that I am more graceful
than the yellow flowers.

EmpressWitchDoesntBurn
Wow! That is a stunning piece of writing.

I’m not sure exactly why, but I’ve been haunted by this poem of Emily Bronte’s ever since I read it in my teens. Maybe it’s something to do with knowing about her own short and tragic life:

It will not shine again:
Its sad course is done;
I have seen the last ray wane
Of the cold, bright sun.

Catrin - Gillian Clarke

I can remember you, child,
As I stood in a hot, white
Room at the window watching
The people and cars taking
Turn at the traffic lights.
I can remember you, our first
Fierce confrontation, the tight
Red rope of love which we both
Fought over. It was a square
Environmental blank, disinfected
Of paintings or toys. I wrote
All over the walls with my
Words, coloured the clean squares
With the wild, tender circles
Of our struggle to become
Separate. We want, we shouted,
To be two, to be ourselves.

Neither won nor lost the struggle
In the glass tank clouded with feelings
Which changed us both. Still I am fighting
You off, as you stand there
With your straight, strong, long
Brown hair and your rosy,
Defiant glare, bringing up
From the heart's pool that old rope,
Tightening about my life,
Trailing love and conflict,
As you ask may you skate
In the dark, for one more hour.

Thanks for starting this thread, Arabella. Lovely way to start the morning.

Wild Geese - Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting

• over and over announcing your place

Wow. I'll never cease to be amazed at this level of creativity. And how what they write is so instantly relatable.

Awesome stuff.

FOR STRONG WOMEN
by Marge Piercy (1985)

A strong woman is a woman who is straining
A strong woman is a woman standing
on tiptoe and lifting a barbell
while trying to sing “Boris Godunov.”
A strong woman is a woman at work
cleaning out the cesspool of the ages,
and while she shovels, she talks about
how she doesn’t mind crying, it opens
the ducts of the eyes, and throwing up
develops the stomach muscles, and
she goes on shoveling with tears in her nose.

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.

A strong woman is a woman bleeding
inside. A strong woman is a woman making
herself strong every morning while her teeth
loosen and her back throbs. Every baby,
a tooth, midwives used to say, and now
every battle a scar. A strong woman
is a mass of scar tissue that aches
when it rains and wounds that bleed
when you bump them and memories that get up
in the night and pace in boots to and fro.

A strong woman is a woman who craves love
like oxygen or she turns blue choking.
A strong woman is a woman who loves
strongly and weeps strongly and is strongly
terrified and has strong needs. A strong woman is strong
in words, in action, in connection, in feeling;
she is not strong as a stone but as a wolf
suckling her young. Strength is not in her, but she
enacts it as the wind fills a sail.

What comforts her is others loving
her equally for the strength and for the weakness
from which it issues, lightning from a cloud.
Lightning stuns. In rain, the clouds disperse.
Only water of connection remains,
flowing through us. Strong is what we make
each other. Until we are all strong together,
a strong woman is a woman strongly afraid.

“Never Offer Your Heart to Someone Who Eats Hearts” by Alice Walker

Never offer your heart
to someone who eats hearts
who finds heartmeat
delicious
but not rare
who sucks the juices
drop by drop
and bloody-chinned
grins
like a God.
Never offer your heart
to a heart gravy lover.
Your stewed, overseasoned
heart consumed
he will sop up your grief
with bread
and send it shuttling
from side to side
in his mouth
like bubblegum.
If you find yourself
in love
with a person
who eats hearts
these things
you must do:
Freeze your heart
immediately.
Let him—next time
he examines your chest—
find your heart cold
flinty and unappetizing.
Refrain from kissing
lest he in revenge
dampen the spark
in your soul.
Now,
sail away to Africa
where holy women
await you
on the shore—
long having practiced the art
of replacing hearts
with God
and Song.

Two Butterflies went out at Noon by Emily Dickinson

Two Butterflies went out at Noon -
And waltzed above a Farm -
Then stepped straight through the Firmament
And rested on a Beam -

And then -together bore away
Upon a shining Sea -
Though never yet, in any Port -
Their coming mentioned -be -

If spoken by the distant Bird -
If met in Ether Sea
By Frigate, or by Merchantman -
No notice -was -to me -

Marina Tsvetaeva, translated from Russian by Elaine Feinstein. So wonderfully bold in the face of repression. I hear her and her friends laughing with delight about the adventures they’ve had:

We shall not escape Hell
We shall not escape Hell, my passionate
sisters, we shall drink black resins––
we who sang our praises to the Lord
with every one of our sinews, even the finest,

we did not lean over cradles or
spinning wheels at night, and now we are
carried off by an unsteady boat
under the skirts of a sleeveless cloak,

we dressed every morning in
fine Chinese silk, and we would
sing our paradisal songs at
the fire of the robbers’camp,

slovenly needlewomen, (all
our sewing came apart), dancers,
players upon pipes: we have been
the queens of the whole world!

first scarcely covered by rags,
then with constellations in our hair, in
gaol and at feasts we have
bartered away heaven,

in starry nights, in the apple
orchards of Paradise
––Gentle girls, my beloved sisters,
we shall certainly find ourselves in Hell!

I don't suppose it's a love poem really but I love the woman it's about.

Seems appropriate.

Maya Angelou
Still I Rise

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
’Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.
Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don’t you take it awful hard
’Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

It’s an obvious one but I love it.

When I Am Old.

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat that doesn't go, and doesn't suit me,
And I shall spend my pension
on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals,
and say we've no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I am tired,
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells,
And run my stick along the public railings,
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick the flowers in other people's gardens,
And learn to spit.
You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat,
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go,
Or only bread and pickle for a week,
And hoard pens and pencils and beer mats
and things in boxes.
But now we must have clothes that keep us dry,
And pay our rent and not swear in the street,
And set a good example for the children.
We will have friends to dinner and read the papers.
But maybe I ought to practise a little now?
So people who know me
are not too shocked and surprised,
When suddenly I am old
and start to wear purple!

Jenny Joseph

Ahhh lovely thread and I came to post Mary Oliver! So many beautiful poems...

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Little Owl Who Lives in the Orchard
by Mary Oliver

His beak could open a bottle,
and his eyes - when he lifts their soft lids -
go on reading something
just beyond your shoulder -
Blake, maybe,
or the Book of Revelation.

Never mind that he eats only
the black-smocked crickets,
and the dragonflies if they happen
to be out late over the ponds, and of course
the occasional festal mouse.
Never mind that he is only a memo
from the offices of fear -

it’s not size but surge that tells us
when we’re in touch with something real,
and when I hear him in the orchard
fluttering
down the little aliminum
ladder of his scream -
when I see his wings open, like two black ferns,

a flurry of palpitations
as cold as sleet
rackets across the marshlands
of my heart
like a wild spring day.

Somewhere in the universe,
in the gallery of important things,
the babyish owl, ruffled and rakish,
sits on its pedestal.
Dear, dark dapple of plush!
A message, reads the label,
from that mysterious conglomerate:
Oblivion and Co.
The hooked head stares
from its house of dark, feathery lace.
It could be a valentine.

That's phenomenal @EmpressWitchDoesntBurn thanks for sharing!

Re. the thread title, Gertrude Stein is utterly brilliant. Barking, but brilliant.

I also love her contemporary Mina Loy. From 'Song to Joannes':

Spawn of Fantasies
Silting the appraisable
Pig Cupid his rosy snout
Rooting erotic garbage
“Once upon a time”
Pulls a weed white star-topped
Among wild oats sown in mucous-membrane

I would an eye in a Bengal light
Eternity in a sky-rocket
Constellations in an ocean
Whose rivers run no fresher
Than a trickle of saliva

These are suspect places

I must live in my lantern
Trimming subliminal flicker
Virginal to the bellows
Of Experience

That was 1917. Seems in some ways they were more liberated than we are now.

That’s reminded me! Yet another clergyman, I’m afraid, this one a bit more recent. It was written after his wife’s death, and called ‘A Marriage’.

                      We met
                                under a shower
                    of bird-notes.
                                Fifty years passed,
                    love’s moment
                                in a world in
                    servitude to time.
                                She was young;
                    I kissed with my eyes
                                closed and opened
                    them on her wrinkles.
                                ‘Come,’ said death,
                    choosing her as his
                                partner for
                    the last dance. And she
                                who in life
                    had done everything
                                with a bird’s grace,
                    opened her bill now
                                for the shedding
                    of one sigh no
                                heavier than a feather.

RS Thomas