Marge Piercy

The feminist poet's verses range from the amusingly elegiac to the erotic and polemical and include a series of thirteen intensely personal, carefully crafted poems based on the lunar calendar

The Moon is Always Female

Nica

Nothing is won by endurance but endurance.

Planes make me think of dying suddenly, and loving of dying slowly, the heat loss of failure and betrayed trust. Yet I cast myself on you, closing my eyes as I leap and then opening them wide as I land.

All of you I can still touch, I cherish: how easily torn, how quickly smashed we are. Each street bristles with impaling machines. I say, Take Care; yet we can’t love in armor, can’t dance inside tanks, can’t wave at the world from a barnacle shell. 

You grew old in your craft but never respectable.

I thought this was a love story, but of how much you and I both love you?

I prefer to quarrel with those I truly love.

I find it easy to admire in trees what depresses me in people.

Avoid the poet who tells his love loudly in public; in private he counts his money.

If aches are wrought into artifact, if spilled blood is read for omens and my outcries are carefully shaped for perusal, do I hurt less?

They say the year begins in January, but it feels like the same old year to me.

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