Marge Piercy

Marge Piercy Poems

This girlchild was born as usual
and presented dolls that did pee-pee
and miniature GE stoves and irons
and wee lipsticks the color of cherry candy.
...

The bonsai tree
in the attractive pot
could have grown eighty feet tall
on the side of a mountain
...

The construction of a woman:
a woman is not made of flesh
of bone and sinew
belly and breasts, elbows and liver and toe.
...

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
...

Purple as tulips in May, mauve
into lush velvet, purple
as the stain blackberries leave
on the lips, on the hands,
...

Sometimes we collide, tectonic plates merging,
continents shoving, crumpling down into the molten
veins of fire deep in the earth and raising
tons of rock into jagged crests of Sierra.
...

We sat across the table.
he said, cut off your hands.
they are always poking at things.
they might touch me.
...

The woman in the ordinary pudgy downcast girl
is crouching with eyes and muscles clenched.
Round and pebble smooth she effaces herself
under ripples of conversation and debate.
...

A heap of wheat, says the Song of Songs
but I've never seen wheat in a pile.
Apples, potatoes, cabbages, carrots
make lumpy stacks, but you are sleek
...

Talent is what they say
you have after the novel
is published and favorably
reviewed. Beforehand what
...

And thus the people every year
in the valley of humid July
did sacrifice themselves
to the long green phallic god
...

1.

The dark socket of the year
the pit, the cave where the sun lies down
...

Tomatoes rosy as perfect baby's buttocks,
eggplants glossy as waxed fenders,
purple neon flawless glistening
peppers, pole beans fecund and fast
...

Mine, says the cat, putting out his paw of darkness.
My lover, my friend, my slave, my toy, says
the cat making on your chest his gesture of drawing
milk from his mother's forgotten breasts.
...

She wore little teeth of pearls around her neck.
They were grinning politely and evenly at me.
Unsuitable they smirked. It is true
...

Girls buck the wind in the grooves toward work
in fuzzy coats promised to be warm as fur.
The shop windows snicker
flashing them hurrying over dresses they cannot afford:
...

You strop my anger, especially
when I find you in restaurant or bar
and pay for the same liquid, coming and going.
In bus depots and airports and turnpike plazas
...

Man stomping over my bed in boots
carrying a large bronze church bell
which you occasionally drop:
gross man with iron heels
...

I am packing to go to the airport
but somehow I am never packed.
I keep remembering more things
I keep forgetting.
...

That afternoon the dream of the toads
rang through the elms by Little River
and affected the thoughts of men,
though they were not conscious that
...

Marge Piercy Biography

an American poet, novelist, and social activist. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Gone to Soldiers, a sweeping historical novel set during World War II. Piercy was born in Detroit, Michigan, to a family deeply affected by the Great Depression. She was the first in her family to attend college, studying at the University of Michigan. Winning a Hopwood Award for Poetry and Fiction (1957) enabled her to finish college and spend some time in France, and her formal schooling ended with an M.A. from Northwestern University. Her first book of poems, Breaking Camp, was published in 1968. An indifferent student in her early years, Piercy developed a love of books when she came down with rheumatic fever in her mid-childhood and could do little but read. "It taught me that there's a different world there, that there were all these horizons that were quite different from what I could see," she said in a 1984 Wired interview. As of 2004 she is author of seventeen volumes of poems, among them The Moon is Always Female (1980, considered a feminist classic) and The Art of Blessing the Day (1999), as well as fifteen novels, one play (The Last White Class, co-authored with her third and current husband Ira Wood), one collection of essays (Parti-colored Blocks for a Quilt), one nonfiction book, and one memoir. Her novels and poetry often focus on feminist or social concerns, although her settings vary. While Body of Glass (published in the USA as He, She and It) is a science fiction novel that won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, City of Darkness, City of Light is set during the French Revolution. Other of her novels, such as Summer People and The Longings of Women are set during the modern day. All of her books share a focus on women's lives. Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) mixes a time travel story with issues of social justice, feminism, and the treatment of the mentally ill. This novel is considered a classic of utopian "speculative" science fiction as well as a feminist classic. William Gibson has credited Woman on the Edge of Time as the birthplace of Cyberpunk. Piercy tells this in an introduction to Body of Glass. Body of Glass (He, She and It) (1991) postulates an environmentally ruined world dominated by sprawling mega-cities and a futuristic version of the Internet, through which Piercy weaves elements of Jewish mysticism and the legend of the Golem, although a key story element is the main character's attempts to regain custody of her young son. Piercy's poetry tends to be highly personal free verse and often addresses the same concern with feminist and social issues. Her work shows commitment to the dream of social change (what she might call, in Judaic terms, tikkun olam, or the repair of the world), rooted in story, the wheel of the Jewish year, and a range of landscapes and settings. She lives in Wellfleet on Cape Cod, Massachusetts with her husband, Ira Wood.)

The Best Poem Of Marge Piercy

Barbie Doll

This girlchild was born as usual
and presented dolls that did pee-pee
and miniature GE stoves and irons
and wee lipsticks the color of cherry candy.
Then in the magic of puberty, a classmate said:
You have a great big nose and fat legs.

She was healthy, tested intelligent,
possessed strong arms and back,
abundant sexual drive and manual dexterity.
She went to and fro apologizing.
Everyone saw a fat nose on thick legs.

She was advised to play coy,
exhorted to come on hearty,
exercise, diet, smile and wheedle.
Her good nature wore out
like a fan belt.
So she cut off her nose and her legs
and offered them up.

In the casket displayed on satin she lay
with the undertaker's cosmetics painted on,
a turned-up putty nose,
dressed in a pink and white nightie.
Doesn't she look pretty? everyone said.
Consummation at last.
To every woman a happy ending.

Marge Piercy Comments

Chano Leal 18 November 2012

A STORY RESOUNDING OF A WOMAN WITH THUNDEROUS THIGHS THUD, THUD, GARGANUTIOUS PLIGHT ALAS SHE CARRIED A LARGE BULBOUS NOSE MARGE, TRULY APPRECIATIVE OF THY PROSE.

10 11 Reply
Rachael Brennan 22 June 2015

Marge Piercy has been my all time favourite poet for several decades now. And she still impresses me.

8 4 Reply
p.a. noushad 10 May 2015

Dear Marge Piercy, I like your verses.

5 4 Reply
Isaac Halberstadt 12 August 2017

I came across her work quite by accident while scanning the shelves of a dusty old book store, I was intrigued by the title, 'The Moon is Always Female'. I took it down and was further intrigued by the cover, a painting of the moon being Eclipsed by a grinning, green-eyed Cheshire Cat. I opened it up at random and was intrigued further still by the poem titled 'For Strong Women'. I read the poem, and was hooked for life. Marge Peircy's poetry breathes a sensitive femininity which is calloused with hard-won respect and gritty with the determination to make a better world through her words and experiences. She is not afraid to show her cuts bruises, nor is she afraid to cut and bruise the reader in return with her dagger-sharp words and inescapable imagery that barrels down on you like a freight train. To read her works is to be made very small and very strong, all at the same time.

4 1 Reply
Michelle 23 November 2021

Hey. You are accurately articulate. Extremely cool. Thank you

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Sylvia Frances Chan 11 January 2024

CAPE COD is most beautiful place, we had been there, that's why I write that here. Cape Cod, so calm, peaceful and poetic. So many inspirations here.

0 0 Reply
Sylvia Frances Chan 22 August 2021

Dear Great Poetess Marge Piercy, I like very much reading your powerful words in your amazing poetry! Best regards, Sylvia Frances Chan in The Netherlands

0 1 Reply
Kumarmani Mahakul 02 December 2020

Poems of poetess Marge Piercy motivates many of the world readers due to magical effect. We love reading her poems.

1 0 Reply
Bri Edwards 18 November 2018

Barbie Doll goes to MyPoemList and into my December 2018 showcase. Thanks. bri (:

1 1 Reply
Bri Edwards 15 November 2018

i just read Marge's Barbie Doll. i found it to be a fantastic write. it's about how people are treated and how they may react when they are NOT 'picture-perfect' [women] as portrayed on covers (and in centerfolds) of magazines, in TV ads, and on couter runways. bri (:

1 1 Reply

Marge Piercy Quotes

She never felt much in common with gay men; it was like telling her she ought to feel empathy with child molesters because they were both defined by the law as sexual deviants.

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