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Marge Piercy
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“Memory's a freakish bank / where embarrassing treasures / still draw interest.”
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“Falling out of love / is a rusty chain going quickly through a winch. / It hurts more than you will remember.”
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“The ruling class isn't dissatisfied: they are healthy, well-fed, live in beauty, enjoy their own importance: fun-loving cannibals.”
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“One trouble: to be a professional anything in the United States is to think of oneself as an expert and one's ideas as semisacred, and to treat others in a certain way — professionally.”
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“The incidence of violent brand-loyalty to one's own current dogma has risen.”
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“The will to be totally rational / is the will to be made out of glass and steel: / and to use others as if they were glass and steel.”
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“The pitcher cries for water to carry / and a person for work that is real.”
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“Troubles cured you salty as a country ham, / smoky to the taste, thick skinned and tender inside ...”
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“Regret is a damp wind / off the used car lot / where most of our peers came to rest.”
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“... the body is simple as a turtle / and straight as a dog: / the body cannot lie.”
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“If what we change does not change us / we are playing with blocks.”
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“She must learn again to speak / starting with I / starting with we / starting as the infant does / with her own true hunger / and pleasure / and rage.”
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“Nobody can live on a bridge / or plant potatoes / but it is fine for comings and goings, / meetings, partings and long views / and a real connection to someplace else / where you may / in the crazy weathers of struggle / now and again want to be.”
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“Whatever is not an energy source, is an energy sink.”
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“Despair is the worst betrayal, the coldest seduction: / to believe at last that the enemy will prevail.”
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“Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground. / You cannot tell always by looking what is happening. ”
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“History is a game played backwards only.”
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“Pain is a forcing sieve that turns me to gruel.”
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“How beautiful is trouble / actively pursued.”
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“I am thirsty for your hands / light as water on me.”
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“I love what I cannot be / as well as what I am.”
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“Fear of rape is a cold wind blowing / all of the time on a woman's hunched back. ”
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“The moon is always female and so am I although often in the vale of razorblades I have wished I could put on and take off my sex like a dress and why not?”
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“We are rich earthy cooks / both of us and the flesh we are working / off was put on with grave pleasure.”
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“Nothing is won by endurance / but endurance.”
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“Moments / of sinking my teeth / into now like a hungry fox: / never otherwise / am I so cruel; / never otherwise / so happy.”
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“What a richly colored strong warm coat / is woven when love is the warp and work is the woof.”
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“Work is its own cure. You have to / like it better than being loved.”
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“... age / has gutted me to rubbing bones / knotted up in a leather sack ...”
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“Burning dinner is not incompetence but war.”
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“Too much self-regard has never struck me as dignified: trying to twist over my shoulder to view my own behind.”
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“My idea of hell is to be young again.”
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“I don't even remember what Mother and I quarreled about: it is a continual quarrel that began when I reached puberty.”
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“He ... treats his emotions like mice that infest our basement or the rats in the garage, as vermin to be crushed in traps or poisoned with bait.”
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“If sex is a war, I am a conscientious objector: I will not play.”
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“[Long hair] is considered bohemian, which may be why I grew it, but I keep it long because I love the way it feels, part cloak, part fan, part mane, part security blanket.”
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“Love says, mine. Love says, I could eat you up. Love says, stay as you are, be my own private thing, don't you dare have ideas I don't share. Love has just got to gobble the other, bones and all, crunch. I don't want to do that. I sure don't want it done to me!”
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“All women are misfits, I think; we do not fit into this world without amputations.”
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“Our wedding plans please everybody as if we were fertilizing the earth and creating social luck.”
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“Now that I am in my forties, she [my mother] tells me I'm beautiful; now that I am in my forties, she sends me presents and we have the long, personal and even remarkably honest phone calls I always wanted so intensely I forbade myself to imagine them. How strange. Perhaps Shaw was correct and if we lived to be several hundred years old, we would finally work it all out. I am deeply grateful. With my poems, I finally won even my mother. The longest wooing of my life.”
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“You called me bad and I posed like a gutter / queen in a dress sewn of knives. / All I feared was being stuck in a box / with a lid. A good woman appeared to me / indistinguishable from a dead one / except that she worked all the time.”
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“My mother is my mirror and I am hers. / What do we see? Our face grown young again ... ”
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“Like species, couples die out or evolve. ”
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“A woman and a Jew, sometimes more / of a contradiction than I can sweat out, / yet finally the intersection that is both / collision and fusion, stone and seed.”
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“Life on the streets killed you slow, but sometimes people or the weather saw that it happened a lot faster.”
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“We admire predators — panthers, lions, tigers, even wolves. Maybe to be naturally thoughtful and hesitant to use violence is to be somehow second rate. To be in the middle of the social food chain. Especially if you're a man. This society thinks real men are violent.”
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“Bless the gift of memory / that breaks unbidden, released / from a flower or a cup of tea / so the dead move like rain through the room.”
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“It is not sex that gives the pleasure, but the lover.”
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“If you want to be listened to, you should put in time listening.”
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“Life is the first gift, love is the second, and understanding the third.”
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“The moon floats belly up like a dead goldfish.”
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“The moment shimmered like a glass of full-bodied wine.”
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“Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen.”
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“I walk under the sickle moon / sharpened and new and whistling.”
Marge Piercy, U.S. writer, poet
(1936)