Sexism

Related poetry:

1. Layover Making love in the sun, in the morning sun In a hotel room Above the alley Where poor men poke for bottles; Making love in the sun Making love by a carpet redder than our blood, Making love while the boys sell headlines And Cadillacs, Making love by a photograph of Paris And an open […]...
2. The Cat in the Kitchen (For Donald Hall) Have you heard about the boy who walked by The black water? I won’t say much more. Let’s wait a few years. It wanted to be entered. Sometimes a man walks by a pond, and a hand Reaches out and pulls him in. There was no Intention, exactly. The pond was lonely, […]...
3. Loneliness Being apart and lonely is like rain. It climbs toward evening from the ocean plains; From flat places, rolling and remote, it climbs To heaven, which is its old abode. And only when leaving heaven drops upon the city. It rains down on us in those twittering Hours when the streets turn their faces to […]...
4. Sunset Slowly the west reaches for clothes of new colors Which it passes to a row of ancient trees. You look, and soon these two worlds both leave you One part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth. Leaving you, not really belonging to either, Not so hopelessly dark as that house that is silent, Not […]...
5. The Conversation Of Prayer The conversation of prayers about to be said By the child going to bed and the man on the stairs Who climbs to his dying love in her high room, The one not caring to whom in his sleep he will move And the other full of tears that she will be dead, Turns in […]...
6. When Man Enters Woman When man, Enters woman, Like the surf biting the shore, Again and again, And the woman opens her mouth with pleasure And her teeth gleam Like the alphabet, Logos appears milking a star, And the man Inside of woman Ties a knot So that they will Never again be separate And the woman Climbs into […]...
7. Let Me Not Forget If it is not my portion to meet thee in this life Then let me ever feel that I have missed thy sight – let me not forget for a moment, Let me carry the pangs of this sorrow in my dreams And in my wakeful hours. As my days pass in the crowded market […]...
8. The Happiest Day, The Happiest Hour The happiest day – the happiest hour My sear’d and blighted heart hath known, The highest hope of pride and power, I feel hath flown. Of power! said I? yes! such I ween; But they have vanish’d long, alas! The visions of my youth have been- But let them pass. And, pride, what have I […]...
9. A Week Later A week later, I said to a friend: I don’t Think I could ever write about it. Maybe in a year I could write something. There is something in me maybe someday To be written; now it is folded, and folded, And folded, like a note in school. And in my dream Someone was playing […]...
10. Verse-Making Was Least of My Virtues Verse-making was least of my virtues: I viewed with despair Wealth that never yet was but might be all that verse-making were If the life would but lengthen to wish, let the mind be laid bare. So I said, “To do little is bad, to do nothing is worse” And made verse. Love-making, how simple […]...
11. To Marianne Moore If the idea of immortality is excluded, There remains dust, Grass, Water that forms puddles, The branch from which the bird sings, A certain mystery that reason Supposes a fleeting shadow. There remains, in the end, life, The room where a woman pulls on her stockings, The other room, perhaps adjoining, Where a couple undress […]...
12. When A Woman Loves A Man When she says Margarita she means Daiquiri. When she says quixotic she means mercurial. And when she says, “I’ll never speak to you again,” She means, “Put your arms around me from behind As I stand disconsolate at the window.” He’s supposed to know that. When a man loves a woman he is in New […]...
13. The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me “the withness of the body” Whitehead The heavy bear who goes with me, A manifold honey to smear his face, Clumsy and lumbering here and there, The central ton of every place, The hungry beating brutish one In love with candy, anger, and sleep, Crazy factotum, dishevelling all, Climbs the building, kicks the football, Boxes […]...
14. We are Transmitters As we live, we are transmitters of life. And when we fail to transmit life, life fails to flow through us. That is part of the mystery of sex, it is a flow onwards. Sexless people transmit nothing. And if, as we work, we can transmit life into our work, Life, still more life, rushes […]...
15. This Beautiful Black Marriage Photograph negative Her black arm: a diving porpoise, Sprawled across the ice-banked pillow. Head: a sheet of falling water. Her legs: icicle branches breaking into light. This woman, Photographed sleeping. The man, Making the photograph in the acid pan of his brain. Sleep stain them both, As if cloudy semen Rubbed shiningly over the surface […]...
16. Now! Out of your whole life give but a moment! All of your life that has gone before, All to come after it, so you ignore, So you make perfect the present, condense, In a rapture of rage, for perfection’s endowment, Thought and feeling and soul and sense, Merged in a moment which gives me at […]...
17. Recorders Ages Hence RECORDERS ages hence! Come, I will take you down underneath this impassive exterior-I will tell you what to say of me; Publish my name and hang up my picture as that of the tenderest lover, The friend, the lover’s portrait, of whom his friend, his lover, was fondest, Who was not proud of his songs, […]...
18. Dear Colette Dear Colette, I want to write to you About being a woman For that is what you write to me. I want to tell you how your face Enduring after thirty, forty, fifty. . . Hangs above my desk Like my own muse. I want to tell you how your hands Reach out from your […]...
19. A Valentine For Hands names, silence-quietest minutes (building like rain or returning like seas) Since they have touched me, your warm hands have sown Gentlest sounds, touches and hours (or, building like rain, turning, like seas) (building like rain, or returning like seas) Ripples and springs-the shiniest rivers- Since they have known me your warm hands have gathered Smallest, […]...
20. I love you in the morning I love you in the morning and at the setting of the sun And in the hours of darkness before the day’s begun And in my waking solitude to greet the break of dawn I grant you sleep that extra hour, although you sleep alone. I love you in the evening and into the night, […]...
21. The End of the World Here, at the end of the world, The flowers bleed As if they were hearts, The hearts ooze a darkness Like india ink, & poets dip their pens in & they write. “Here, at the end of the world,” They write, Not knowing what it means. “Here, where the sky nurses on black milk, Where […]...
22. If You Only Knew Far from me and like the stars, the sea and all the trappings of poetic myth, Far from me but here all the same without your knowing, Far from me and even more silent because I imagine you endlessly. Far from me, my lovely mirage and eternal dream, you cannot know. If you only knew. […]...
23. The Waking I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go. We think by feeling. What is there to know? I hear my being dance from ear to ear. I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. Of […]...
24. "I Love You Sweatheart&quot A man risked his life to write the words. A man hung upside down (an idiot friend Holding his legs?) with spray paint To write the words on a girder fifty feet above A highway. And his beloved, The next morning driving to work…? His words are not (meant to be) so unique. Does she […]...
25. I'm Your Man If you want a lover I’ll do anything you ask me to And if you want another kind of love I’ll wear a mask for you If you want a partner Take my hand Or if you want to strike me down in anger Here I stand I’m your man If you want a boxer […]...
26. How Much Earth Torn into light, you woke wriggling On a woman’s palm. Halved, quartered, Shredded to the wind, you were the life That thrilled along the underbelly Of a stone. Stilled in the frozen pond You rinsed heaven with a sigh. How much earth is a man. A wall fies down and roses Rush from its teeth; […]...
27. Modern Love XV: I Think She Sleeps I think she sleeps: it must be sleep, when low Hangs that abandoned arm toward the floor; The face turned with it. Now make fast the door. Sleep on: it is your husband, not your foe. The Poet’s black stage-lion of wronged love, Frights not our modern dames: well if he did! Now will I […]...
28. Village Mystery The woman in the pointed hood And cloak blue-gray like a pigeon’s wing, Whose orchard climbs to the balsam-wood, Has done a cruel thing. To her back door-step came a ghost, A girl who had been ten years dead, She stood by the granite hitching-post And begged for a piece of bread. Now why should […]...
29. Psalm of Those Who Go Forth Before Daylight THE POLICEMAN buys shoes slow and careful; The teamster buys gloves slow and careful; They take care of their feet and hands; They live on their feet and hands. The milkman never argues; He works alone and no one speaks to him; The city is asleep when he is on the job; He puts a […]...
30. Bustopher Jones: The Cat About Town Bustopher Jones is not skin and bones In fact, he’s remarkably fat. He doesn’t haunt pubs he has eight or nine clubs, For he’s the St. James’s Street Cat! He’s the Cat we all greet as he walks down the street In his coat of fastidious black: No commonplace mousers have such well-cut trousers Or […]...
31. Threshold I was not aware of the moment When I first crossed the threshold of this life. What was the power that made me open out into this vast mystery Like a bud in the forest at midnight! When in the morning I looked upon the light I felt in a moment that I was no […]...
32. Out of ideas If I don’t write something good tonight I will sleep Without the comforting Canopus of deep believers, If I sleep at all, and this light which ignites My enormous poetic conceit and guides my muse Will suffer and die, my hands be stilled. Tomorrow I might read these words and endure The bite of astral […]...
33. Pigeon THE FLUTTER of blue pigeon’s wings Under a river bridge Hunting a clean dry arch, A corner for a sleep- This flutters here in a woman’s hand. A singing sleep cry, A drunken poignant two lines of song, Somebody looking clean into yesterday And remembering, or looking clean into To-morrow, and reading,- This sings here […]...
34. Willard Fluke My wife lost her health, And dwindled until she weighed scarce ninety pounds. Then that woman, whom the men Styled Cleopatra, came along. And we we married ones All broke our vows, myself among the rest. Years passed and one by one Death claimed them all in some hideous form, And I was borne along […]...
35. Adam's Curse We sat together at one summer’s end, That beautiful mild woman, your close friend, And you and I, and talked of poetry. I said, ‘A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, Our stitching and unstitching has been naught. Better go down upon your marrow-bones And scrub […]...
36. Hither, Hither, Love Hither hither, love – ‘Tis a shady mead – Hither, hither, love! Let us feed and feed! Hither, hither, sweet – ‘Tis a cowslip bed – Hither, hither, sweet! ‘Tis with dew bespread! Hither, hither, dear By the breath of life, Hither, hither, dear! – Be the summer’s wife! Though one moment’s pleasure In one […]...
37. Authorship You say that father write a lot of books, but what he write I don’t Understand. He was reading to you all the evening, but could you really Make out what he meant? What nice stores, mother, you can tell us! Why can’t father Write like that, I wonder? Did he never hear from his […]...
38. I SEE A WOMAN MAKING UP I see a woman any woman making up and change First she is thinking of something else (because when a woman Begins to make up she hasn’t yet separated this act from the rest of the day). But when arranging the various objects that the ceremony Preciously determines in the exact place around her hands […]...
39. His Wife, The Painter There are sketches on the walls of men and women and ducks, And outside a large green bus swerves through traffic like Insanity sprung from a waving line; Turgenev, Turgenev, Says the radio, and Jane Austin, Jane Austin, too. “I am going to do her portrait on the 28th, while you are At work.” He […]...
40. The Wicked Postman Why do you sit there on the floor so quiet and silent, tell me, Mother dear? The rain is coming in through the open window, making you all Wet, and you don’t mind it. Do you hear the gong striking four? It is time for my brother To come home from school. What has happened […]...