She Walks in Beauty: A Woman's Journey Through Poems (14 page)

E. E. CUMMINGS

if there are any heavens my mother will(all by herself)have

one. It will not be a pansy heaven nor

a fragile heaven of lilies-of-the-valley but

it will be a heaven of blackred roses

my father will be (deep like a rose

tall like a rose)

standing near my

(swaying over her

silent)

with eyes which are really petals and see

nothing with the face of a poet really which

is a flower and not a face with

hands

which whisper

This is my beloved my

                                (suddenly in sunlight

he will bow,

& the whole garden will bow)

MARY DOW BRINE

The woman was old and ragged and gray

And bent with the chill of the Winter's day.

The street was wet with a recent snow

And the woman's feet were aged and slow.

She stood at the crossing and waited long,

Alone, uncared for, amid the throng

Of human beings who passed her by

Nor heeded the glance of her anxious eye.

Down the street, with laughter and shout,

Glad in the freedom of “school let out,”

Came the boys like a flock of sheep,

Hailing the snow piled white and deep.

Past the woman so old and gray

Hastened the children on their way.

Nor offered a helping hand to her—

So meek, so timid, afraid to stir

Lest the carriage wheels or the horses' feet

Should crowd her down in the slippery street.

At last came one of the merry troop,

The gayest laddie of all the group;

He paused beside her and whispered low,

“I'll help you cross, if you wish to go.”

Her aged hand on his strong young arm

She placed, and so, without hurt or harm,

He guided the trembling feet along,

Proud that his own were firm and strong.

Then back again to his friends he went,

His young heart happy and well content.

“She's somebody's mother, boys, you know,

For all she's aged and poor and slow,

“And I hope some fellow will lend a hand

To help my mother, you understand,

“If ever she's poor and old and gray,

When her own dear boy is far away.”

And “somebody's mother” bowed low her head

In her home that night, and the prayer she said

Was, “God be kind to the noble boy,

Who is somebody's son, and pride and joy!”

And Ruth said,

Intreat me not to leave thee,

or
to return from following after thee:

For whither thou goest,

I will go;

and where thou lodgest,

I will lodge.

Thy people shall be my people,

and thy God my God.

Where thou diest, will I die,

and there will I be buried.

The Lord do so to me, and more also,

if aught
but death part thee and me.

ELIZABETH ALEXANDER

In the room almost filled with our bed,

the small bedroom, the king-sized bed high up

and on casters so sometimes we would roll,

in the room in the corner of the corner

apartment on top of a hill so the bed would roll,

we felt as if we might break off and drift,

float, and become our own continent.

When your mother first entered our apartment

she went straight to that room and libated our bed

with water from your homeland. Soon she saw

in my cheeks the fire and poppy stain,

and soon thereafter on that bed came the boy.

Then months, then the morning I cracked first one

then two then three eggs in a white bowl

and all had double yolks, and your mother

(now our mother) read the signs. Signs everywhere,

signs rampant, a season of signs and a vial

of white dirt brought across three continents

to the enormous white bed that rolled

and now held three, and soon held four,

four on the bed, two boys, one man, and me,

our mother reading all signs and blessing our bed,

blessing our bed filled with babies, blessing our bed

through her frailty, blessing us and our bed,

blessing us and our bed.

                                            She began to dream

of childhood flowers, her long-gone parents.

I told her my dream in a waiting room:

a photographer photographed women,

said her portraits revealed their truest selves.

She snapped my picture, peeled back the paper,

and there was my son's face, my first son, my self.

Mamma loved that dream so I told it again.

And soon she crossed over to her parents,

sisters, one son (War took that son.

We destroy one another), and women came

by twos and tens wrapped in her same fine white

bearing huge pans of stew, round breads, homemade wines,

and men came in suits with their ravaged faces

and together they cried and cried and cried

and keened and cried and the sound

was a live hive swelling and growing,

all the water in the world, all the salt, all the wails,

and the sound grew too big for the building and finally

lifted what needed to be lifted from the casket and we quieted

and watched it waft up and away like feather, like ash.

Daughter
, she said, when her journey began,
You are a mother now
,

and you have to take care of the world.

MAXINE SCATES

This is everything she ever closed a door

on, the broom closet of childhood

where no one could ever find a broom.

Here, layer upon layer, nothing breathes:

photo albums curl at the edges, books

she brought home from the library

where she worked, handled by thousands

of other hands before their final exile

where they've waited, paper and more paper

taking in the ocean air, about to sprout.

Mother's sitting on the bed

with her tattered list of dispersals—who gets

what among the treasures she hopes

I'll find, but I know I'm seeing

what she doesn't want me to see,

the daughter cleaning doing what the son

would never do. After an hour of excavation

the console TV emerges from beneath

forgotten sweaters and balled up nylons

saved for stuffing puppets, a long ago church project—

the TV arrived in 1966 same day I crushed

the fender of the car, upsetting

the careful plans she'd made for payment.

She wants to leave so much behind. Hours later

I've found nothing I want but the purple mache mask

I made in the fourth grade. I like its yellow eyes.

She looks at each magazine I remove, saving

every word about my brother, the coach. He's sixty

and a long dead mouse has eaten the laces

of his baby shoes. I want order. I say

I'm old myself, I've started throwing things away.

I'm lying. I've kept everything she's ever given me.

ELIZABETH ALEXANDER

I love all the mom bodies at this beach,

the tummies, the one-piece bathing suits,

the bosoms that slope, the wide nice bottoms,

thigh flesh shirred as gentle wind shirrs a pond.

So many sensible haircuts and ponytails!

These bodies show they have grown babies, then

nourished them, woken to their cries, fretted

at their fevers. Biceps have lifted and toted

the babies now printed on their mothers.

“If you lined up a hundred vaginas,

I could tell you which ones have borne children,”

the midwife says. In the secret place or

in sunlight at the beach, our bodies say

This is who we are, no, This is what

we have done and continue to do.

We labor in love. We do it. We mother.

WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA

“Woman, what's your name?” “I don't know.”

“How old are you? Where are you from?” “I don't know.”

“Why did you dig that burrow?” “I don't know.”

“How long have you been hiding?” “I don't know.”

“Why did you bite my finger?” “I don't know.”

“Don't you know that we won't hurt you?” “I don't know.”

“Whose side are you on?” “I don't know.”

“This is war, you've got to choose.” “I don't know.”

“Does your village still exist?” “I don't know.”

“Are those your children?” “Yes.”

MARY LAMB

A child's a plaything for an hour;

Its pretty tricks we try

For that or for a longer space—

Then tire, and lay it by.

But I knew one that to itself

All seasons could control;

That would have mock'd the sense of pain

Out of a grievéd soul.

Thou straggler into loving arms,

Young climber-up of knees,

When I forget thy thousand ways

Then life and all shall cease.

LUCILLE CLIFTON
   
(at St. Mary's)

may the tide

that is entering even now

the lip of our understanding

carry you out

beyond the face of fear

may you kiss

the wind then turn from it

certain that it will

love your back        may you

open your eyes to water

water waving forever

and may you in your innocence

sail through this to that

W
E ARE ALL AFRAID
of being alone. To teenagers, the idea of being alone is almost as bad as the idea of dying, which at least has a certain romantic appeal. But by the time women have young children, we would sacrifice almost anything to be by ourselves in a quiet house—if just for an hour. As we reach middle age, the fear returns. Every woman I know is filled with dread at the prospect of an empty nest. Though our sons may tower over us, and our daughters know more than we do about everything, we still wait up to make sure they are safely home, we volunteer to drive them miles out of our way hoping for a few moments of conversation, we clean their filthy rooms, and offer to give them things they don't particularly want. Just when our children are about to go out in the world as we raised them to, we realize we have become as dependent on them as they are on us.

Middle age is a time to rearrange our lives and enjoy the chance to reflect rather than react. Silence and solitude may take some getting used to, but in my experience, the people who are happy being alone are often the people everyone wants to be around.

Involuntary solitude is another story. The pain of loss, the terror of being abandoned, or an echoing loneliness forces us to confront the most fundamental questions of existence and mortality. Perseverance, fortitude, and faith can help us salvage meaning and connection out of emotional devastation. Reading and writing poetry can help us find a pathway. Poets put universal feelings into words and remind us that in a world of language and feeling, we can never really be alone.

Often, poets celebrate the freedom of solitude. Emily Brontë and Rainer Maria Rilke write of the exhilaration of being unfettered by the world. Li Po, the eighth-century Chinese poet, writes of surrendering to nature and merging with something larger than oneself. Each of these strategies can help us accept the times in our lives when we may be alone, to appreciate them, and to learn from them.

One of my favorite lines of poetry is found in Wallace Stevens's “The Poems of Our Climate.” Stevens describes a world from which everything has been subtracted, leaving only stillness and a bowl of white carnations. Yet the room is full, because of the presence of the “never resting mind.” Through our humanity, we have the power to create new worlds, alone and with others. Stevens concludes with a line celebrating life: “The imperfect is our paradise.” A feeling that women can surely embrace.

EMILY BRONTË

I'm happiest when most away

I can bear my soul from its home of clay

On a windy night when the moon is bright

And my eye can wander through worlds of light

When I am not and none beside

Nor earth nor sea nor cloudless sky

But only spirit wandering wide

Through infinite immensity

MARK STRAND

In a field

I am the absence

of field.

This is

always the case.

Wherever I am

I am what is missing.

When I walk

I part the air

and always

the air moves in

to fill the spaces

where my body's been.

We all have reasons

for moving.

I move

to keep things whole.

MARIANNE MOORE

That silence is best: that action and re-

Action are equal: that control, discipline, and

Liberation are bywords when spoken by an appraiser, that the

Accidental sometimes achieves perfection, loath though we may be to admit it:

And that the realm of art is the realm in

Which to look for “fishbones in the throat of the gang.” Pin-

Pricks and the unstereotyped embarrassment being the contin-

Ual diet of artists. And in spite of it all, poets ask us just what it

Is in them that we cannot subscribe to:

People overbear till told to stop: no matter through

What sobering process they have gone, some inquire if emotion, true

And stimulated are not the same thing: promoters request us to take our oath

That appearances are not cosmic: mis-

Fits in the world of achievement want to know what bus-

Iness people have to reserve judgment about undertakings. It is

A strange idea that one must say what one thinks in order to be understood.