111 Gender and feminism poems

Care work is work raising children is work tending to the sick is work holding community together is work it is rarely paid it is rarely counted it is the infrastructure everything else runs on

Women have no wilderness in them, They are provident instead, Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts To eat dusty bread. They do not see cattle cropping red winter grass, They do not hear Snow water going down under culverts Shallow and clear. They wait, when they should turn to journeys, They stiffen, when they should bend. They use against themselves that benevolence To which no man is friend. They cannot think of so many crops to a field Or of clean wood cleft by an axe. Their love is an eager meaninglessness Too tense, or too lax. They hear in every whisper that speaks to them A shout and a cry. As like as not, when they take life over their door-sills They should let it go by.

Oft have I thrilled at deeds of high emprise, And yearned to venture into realms unknown, Thrice blessed she, I deemed, whom God had shown How to achieve great deeds in woman’s guise. Yet what discov’ry by expectant eyes Of foreign shores, could vision half the throne Full gained by her, whose power fully grown Exceeds the conquerors of th’ uncharted skies? So would I be this woman whom the world Avows its benefactor; nobler far, Than Sybil, Joan, Sappho, or Egypt’s queen. In the alembic forged her shafts and hurled At pain, diseases, waging a humane war; Greater than this achievement, none, I ween.

Some girls        on the other side of this planet will never know        the loveliness of   walking      in a crepe silk sari.      Instead, they will spend        their days                          on their backs for a parade               of   men           who could be       their uncles in another life.         These girls memorize each slight wobble                  of   fan blade as it cuts through the stale       tea air and auto-rickshaw exhaust,        thick as egg curry. Men         shove greasy rupees        at the door for one hour         in a room with a twelve-year-old.                One hour —               One hour — One hour.            And if   she cries afterward, her older sister       will cover it up.         Will rim the waterline             of   her eyes                 with kohl pencil until it looks like                        two silk moths have stopped      to rest       on her exquisite     face.

Three women survive. One hides in a bedroom of a house, sharpening blades in the bathroom, her night. Another disinfects the cloth her older sister contaminates. The third, more tender and insecure, proud and serene, takes her first steps, surrounded by palm trees, lemon trees, pomegranate trees, bougainvilleas, birds of paradise...

Here’s what I had in mind, kōtiro, this clipping at words like overgrown maikuku — return the blankets of domestic life; don’t fold washing or wear shoes, polish these rerenga kē. Eh. But this world. I s’pose neither of us planned to be in politics, never did do what others told us to — wahanui though, go on, get your sedition on girl, your agitator, your defiant speak to each other eye to eye — Māori been jailed for nouns, phrases; butcher up a clause, get buried in Pākehā kupu, then dig that out like the old people. No one approved of their language either.

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.

so he said: you ain’t got no talent if you didn’t have a face you wouldn’t be nobody and she said: god created heaven and earth and all that’s Black within them so he said: you ain’t really no hot shit they tell me plenty sisters take care better business than you and she said: on the third day he made chitterlings and all good things to eat and said: “that’s good” so he said: if the white folks hadn’t been under yo skirt and been giving you the big play you’d a had to come on uptown like everybody else and she replied: then he took a big Black greasy rib from adam and said we will call this woeman and her name will be sapphire and she will divide into four parts that simone may sing a song and he said: you pretty full of yourself ain’t chu so she replied: show me someone not full of herself and i’ll show you a hungry person

if there is a river more beautiful than this bright as the blood red edge of the moon          if there is a river more faithful than this returning each month to the same delta          if there is a river braver than this coming and coming in a surge of passion, of pain          if there is a river more ancient than this daughter of eve mother of cain and of abel          if there is in the universe such a river          if there is some where water more powerful than this wild water pray that it flows also through animals beautiful and faithful and ancient and female and brave

She has been condemned to death by hanging. A man may escape this death by becoming the hangman, a woman by marrying the hangman. But at the present time there is no hangman; thus there is no escape. There is only a death, indefinitely postponed. This is not fantasy, it is history. * To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self. She is living selflessly, she finds a hole in the stone wall and on the other side of the wall, a voice. The voice comes through darkness and has no face. This voice becomes her mirror. * In order to avoid her death, her particular death, with wrung neck and swollen tongue, she must marry the hangman. But there is no hangman, first she must create him, she must persuade this man at the end of the voice, this voice she has never seen and which has never seen her, this darkness, she must persuade him to renounce his face, exchange it for the impersonal mask of death, of official death which has eyes but no mouth, this mask of a dark leper. She must transform his hands so they will be willing to twist the rope around throats that have been singled out as hers was, throats other than hers. She must marry the hangman or no one, but that is not so bad. Who else is there to marry? * You wonder about her crime. She was condemned to death for stealing clothes from her employer, from the wife of her employer. She wished to make herself more beautiful. This desire in servants was not legal. * She uses her voice like a hand, her voice reaches through the wall, stroking and touching. What could she possibly have said that would have convinced him? He was not condemned to death, freedom awaited him. What was the temptation, the one that worked? Perhaps he wanted to live with a woman whose life he had saved, who had seen down into the earth but had nevertheless followed him back up to life. It was his only chance to be a hero, to one person at least, for if he became the hangman the others would despise him. He was in prison for wounding another man, on one finger of the right hand, with a sword. This too is history. * My friends, who are both women, tell me their stories, which cannot be believed and which are true. They are horror stories and they have not happened to me, they have not yet happened to me, they have happened to me but we are detached, we watch our unbelief with horror. Such things cannot happen to us, it is afternoon and these things do not happen in the afternoon. The trouble was, she said, I didn’t have time to put my glasses on and without them I’m blind as a bat, I couldn’t even see who it was. These things happen and we sit at a table and tell stories about them so we can finally believe. This is not fantasy, it is history, there is more than one hangman and because of this some of them are unemployed. * He said: the end of walls, the end of ropes, the opening of doors, a field, the wind, a house, the sun, a table, an apple. She said: nipple, arms, lips, wine, belly, hair, bread, thighs, eyes, eyes. They both kept their promises. * The hangman is not such a bad fellow. Afterwards he goes to the refrigerator and cleans up the leftovers, though he does not wipe up what he accidentally spills. He wants only the simple things: a chair, someone to pull off his shoes, someone to watch him while he talks, with admiration and fear, gratitude if possible, someone in whom to plunge himself for rest and renewal. These things can best be had by marrying a woman who has been condemned to death by other men for wishing to be beautiful. There is a wide choice. * Everyone said he was a fool. Everyone said she was a clever woman. They used the word ensnare . * What did they say the first time they were alone together in the same room? What did he say when she had removed her veil and he could see that she was not a voice but a body and therefore finite? What did she say when she discovered that she had left one locked room for another? They talked of love, naturally, though that did not keep them busy forever. * The fact is there are no stories I can tell my friends that will make them feel better. History cannot be erased, although we can soothe ourselves by speculating about it. At that time there were no female hangmen. Perhaps there have never been any, and thus no man could save his life by marriage. Though a woman could, according to the law. * He said: foot, boot, order, city, fist, roads, time, knife. She said: water, night, willow, rope hair, earth belly, cave, meat, shroud, open, blood. They both kept their promises.