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
...

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

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.
...

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

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

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.
...

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
...

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.
...

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