A rose is a rose is a rose

[ArabellaScott]

... by any other name, would smell as sweet.

How about a thread for poetry by/for women?

Difference of opinion - Wendy Cope

Rachel Irischild, who Empress linked upthread, wrote quite a similar poem.

https://irischild.blogspot.com/2017/08/he-tells-her-after-wendy-cope.html?m=1

Pre-nostalgia, what a great term

Spot on

My children take the piss out of me because we always do things ‘for the last time’ and then generally do it again

I don’t want to miss any of the last times!

Trst

^ sorry about that

Who Said It Was Simple

By Audre Lorde

There are so many roots to the tree of anger

that sometimes the branches shatter

before they bear.

Sitting in Nedicks
the women rally before they march

discussing the problematic girls

they hire to make them free.
An almost white counterman passes

a waiting brother to serve them first

and the ladies neither notice nor reject

the slighter pleasures of their slavery.

But I who am bound by my mirror

as well as my bed
see causes in colour
as well as sex

and sit here wondering

which me will survive

all these liberations.

Planetarium
By Adrienne Rich

Thinking of Caroline Herschel (1750—1848)
astronomer, sister of William; and others.

A woman in the shape of a monster

a monster in the shape of a woman

the skies are full of them

a woman ‘in the snow
among the Clocks and instruments

or measuring the ground with poles’

in her 98 years to discover

8 comets

she whom the moon ruled

like us
levitating into the night sky

riding the polished lenses

Galaxies of women, there
doing penance for impetuousness

ribs chilled

in those spaces of the mind

An eye,

      ‘virile, precise and absolutely certain’
      from the mad webs of Uranusborg

                                                        encountering the NOVA   

every impulse of light exploding

from the core
as life flies out of us

         Tycho whispering at last
         ‘Let me not seem to have lived in vain’

What we see, we see

and seeing is changing

the light that shrivels a mountain

and leaves a man alive

Heartbeat of the pulsar
heart sweating through my body

The radio impulse

pouring in from Taurus

     I am bombarded yet         I stand

I have been standing all my life in the

direct path of a battery of signals
the most accurately transmitted most

untranslatable language in the universe
I am a galactic cloud so deep so invo-
luted that a light wave could take 15

years to travel through me And has

taken I am an instrument in the shape

of a woman trying to translate pulsations

into images for the relief of the body

and the reconstruction of the mind.

I love Sharon Olds and Mary Oliver especially.

I look forwards to reading this thread slowly. I rushed on to post a poem I read for the first time just the other day in an anthology and I loved it, and I thought of the women activists, campaigners and fighters here and elsewhere. I had never heard of the poet, Charlotte Perkins Gilman - (1860-1935) but am keen to know more.

Coming

Because the time is ripe, the age is ready,
Because the world her woman’s help demands,
Out of the long subjection and seclusion
Come to our field of warfare and confusion
The mother's heart and hands.

Long has she stood aside, endured and waited,
While man swung forward, toiling on alone;
Now, for the weary man, so long ill-mated,
Now, for the world for which she was created,
Comes woman to her own.

Not for herself! though sweet the air of freedom;
Not for herself, though dear the new-born power;
But for the child, who needs a nobler mother,
For the whole people, needing one another,
Comes woman to her hour.

Ahhhhhhh what a treat. Thank you.

The poet Gillian Clarke wrote a poem called Marged after she moved from Cardiff to the Welsh countryside in 1984. Marged – Welsh for Margaret – killed herself in 1930, in the house which GC moved to. GC says “She died as a result of poverty. In ‘Letter from a Far Country’ I imagine that tragic day...The poem is prompted by my guilt about Marged’s life and death, my gratitude for our life today in her house, my sympathy for her, as a woman, the things we had in common, the differences between us, between women’s lives then and now. These differences lie in the poem’s language: contrast the pleasures” of GC’s life and the destitution of Marged.

Marged - Gillian Clarke

I think of her sometimes when I lie in bed,
falling asleep in the room I have made in the roof-space
over the old dark parlwr where she died
alone in winter, ill and penniless.
Lighting the lamps, November afternoons,
a reading book, whisky gold in my glass.
At my typewriter tapping under stars
at my new roof window, radio tunes
and dog for company. Or parking the car
where through the mud she called her single cow
up from the field, under the sycamore.
Or looking at the hills she looked at too.
I find her broken crocks, digging her garden.
What else do we share, but being women?

Spartaca

Pippa Little

in the room/ in the street/ on the stair/ where some men make free
in plain sight or in secret as if we were sweetmeat/ to dip
fingers in and then forget – it is the being alone
afterwards that numbs and maims, utterly
alone in the silence of it/ where shame creeps in/
stuns dead/ but now we rise, all women
fondled and hurt and licked in acid jokery and in hate,
pets, sweethearts, loves, darlings, humourless bitches –
we stand together, each one a Spartaca
no longer silent or alone: each voice stronger,
massing, alive, a wild murmuration
of me too/ me too/ me too

Hard Working Women

Msandi Kababa

Hold on Women of great courage
You have held on so bravely and tirelessly
Hold on Women of great courage, hold on

Women have taken control of their families and their families are
now living a better life than before.
Women no longer depend on their husbands to pay for their
children’s school fees
They have put poverty to an end
Jealous down, let us give credit where due
Women of this country, you have become bread winners for your
families
Women of Swaziland, you do not ask for any favours but sought
for space to nurture, grow, and blossom in all areas of life . . .
A sister, daughter, mother, grandmother, a businesswoman, a teacher,
a nurse the list is endless.

You have boldly attacked rough situations and you have conquered
You have stood for what you believe in
Your dreams have come true, your wishes have been fulfilled
Hold on Women of great courage, hold on.

Continue women of great courage
Continue holding on and never give up
The family’s hope is in you
Hold on women of great courage, hold on

I’m ten years away from the corner you laugh on
with your pals, Maggie McGeeney and Jean Duff.
The three of you bend from the waist, holding
each other, or your knees, and shriek at the pavement.
Your polka-dot dress blows round your legs. Marilyn.

I’m not here yet. The thought of me doesn’t occur
in the ballroom with the thousand eyes, the fizzy, movie tomorrows
the right walk home could bring. I knew you would dance
like that. Before you were mine, your Ma stands at the close
with a hiding for the late one. You reckon it’s worth it.

The decade ahead of my loud, possessive yell was the best one, eh?
I remember my hands in those high-heeled red shoes, relics,
and now your ghost clatters toward me over George Square
till I see you, clear as scent, under the tree,
with its lights, and whose small bites on your neck, sweetheart?

Cha cha cha! You’d teach me the steps on the way home from Mass, stamping stars from the wrong pavement. Even then
I wanted the bold girl winking in Portobello, somewhere
in Scotland, before I was born. That glamorous love lasts
where you sparkle and waltz and laugh before you were mine
‘Before you were mine’ Carole Ann Duffy

I love Before You Were Mine, thanks for sharing MrsWooster ♥️

Last Supper - Liz Lochead

She is getting good and ready to renounce
his sweet flesh.
Not just for lent. (For
Ever)
But meanwhile she is assembling the ingredients
for their last treat, the proper
feast (after all
didn’t they always
eat together
rather more than rather well?)
So here she is tearing foliage, scrambling
the salad, maybe lighting candles even, anyway
stepping back to admire the effect of
the table she’s made (and oh yes now
will have to lie on) the silverware,
the nicely al-
dente vegetables, the cooked goose.
He could be depended on to bring the bottle
plus betrayal with a kiss.

Already she was imagining it done with, this feast, and
exactly
what kind of leftover hash she’d make of it
among friends, when it was just
The Girls, when those three met again.
What very good soup
she could render from the bones,
then something substantial, something extra
tasty if not elegant.

Yes, there they’d be, cackling around the cauldron,
spitting out the gristlier bits
of his giblets;
gnawing on the knucklebone of some
intricate irony;
getting grave and dainty at the
petit-gout mouthfuls of reported speech.

‘That’s rich!’ they’d splutter,
munching the lies, fat and sizzling as sausages.
Then they’d sink back
gorged on truth
and their own savage integrity,
sleek on it all, preening
like corbies, their bright eyes blinking
satisfied
till somebody would get hungry
and go hunting again.

Though I have to say, having just read BBC Bitesize's interpretation of the last poem I posted, I interpret it in rather a different way!

This is the poem I read at my dads funeral last year, so please bear in mind that it's about death if this is going to be difficult for you personally.

I stayed up a whole night trying to find one because I was so busy at work just before the funeral and that was the only time I had. When I read this I knew it was the one:

Blessing for the Brokenhearted by Jan Richardson

There is no remedy for love but to love more.
– Henry David Thoreau

Let us agree
for now
that we will not say
the breaking
makes us stronger
or that it is better
to have this pain
than to have done
without this love.

Let us promise
we will not
tell ourselves
time will heal
the wound,
when every day
our waking
opens it anew.

Perhaps for now
it can be enough
to simply marvel
at the mystery
of how a heart
so broken
can go on beating,
as if it were made
for precisely this—
as if it knows
the only cure for love
is more of it,
as if it sees
the heart’s sole remedy
for breaking
is to love still,
as if it trusts
that its own
persistent pulse
is the rhythm
of a blessing
we cannot
begin to fathom
but will save us
nonetheless.

Beautiful erish

Omg how can i spell your name wrong...

Apologies eresh

That's such a stirring poem Eresh, beautiful

Great thread - I had never heard of Mary Oliver, but I am instantly smitten. Thank you to those that posted her work! I am going to buy a book of her poetry.

Omg how can i spell your name wrong...

The Sumerian goddess of the underworld thanks you for correcting it, Rufus

Lovely, Eresh. Some great poems here, all.

@BigHuff

Great thread - I had never heard of Mary Oliver, but I am instantly smitten. Thank you to those that posted her work! I am going to buy a book of her poetry.

Same here!

Another wonderful Mary Oliver poem

The Summer Day**

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?

Bump