Great Poems by American Women

by Great Poems by American Women- An Anthology (epub)

  And a head in the freakish Atlantic

  Where it pours bean green over blue

  In the waters off beautiful Nauset.

  I used to pray to recover you.

  Ach, du.

  In the German tongue, in the Polish town

  Scraped flat by the roller

  Of wars, wars, wars.

  But the name of the town is common.

  My Polack friend

  Says there are a dozen or two.

  So I never could tell where you

  Put your foot, your root,

  I never could talk to you.

  The tongue stuck in my jaw.

  It stuck in a barb wire snare.

  Ich, ich, ich, ich,

  I could hardly speak.

  I thought every German was you.

  And the language obscene

  An engine, an engine

  Chuffing me off like a Jew.

  A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.

  I began to talk like a Jew.

  I think I may well be a Jew.

  The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna

  Are not very pure or true.

  With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck

  And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack

  I may be a bit of a Jew.

  I have always been scared of you,

  With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.

  And your neat mustache

  And your Aryan eye, bright blue.

  Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You—

  Not God but a swastika

  So black no sky could squeak through.

  Every woman adores a Fascist,

  The boot in the face, the brute

  Brute heart of a brute like you.

  You stand at the blackboard, daddy,

  In the picture I have of you,

  A cleft in your chin instead of your foot

  But no less a devil for that, no not

  Any less the black man who

  Bit my pretty red heart in two.

  I was ten when they buried you.

  At twenty I tried to die

  And get back, back, back to you.

  I thought even the bones would do.

  But they pulled me out of the sack,

  And they stuck me together with glue.

  And then I knew what to do.

  I made a model of you,

  A man in black with a Meinkampf look

  And a love of the rack and the screw.

  And I said I do, I do.

  So daddy, I’m finally through.

  The black telephone’s off at the root,

  The voices just can’t worm through.

  If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two—

  The vampire who said he was you

  And drank my blood for a year,

  Seven years, if you want to know.

  Daddy, you can lie back now.

  There’s a stake in your fat black heart

  And the villagers never liked you.

  They are dancing and stamping on you.

  They always knew it was you.

  Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

  Lady Lazarus

  I have done it again.

  One year in every ten

  I manage it—

  A sort of walking miracle, my skin

  Bright as a Nazi lampshade,

  My right foot

  A paperweight,

  My face a featureless, fine

  Jew linen.

  Peel off the napkin

  O my enemy.

  Do I terrify?—

  The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?

  The sour breath

  Will vanish in a day.

  Soon, soon the flesh

  The grave cave ate will be

  At home on me

  And I a smiling woman.

  I am only thirty.

  And like the cat I have nine times to die.

  This is Number Three.

  What a trash

  To annihilate each decade.

  What a million filaments.

  The peanut-crunching crowd

  Shoves in to see

  Them unwrap me hand and foot—

  The big strip tease.

  Gentleman, ladies,

  These are my hands,

  My knees.

  I may be skin and bone,

  Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.

  The first time it happened I was ten.

  It was an accident.

  The second time I meant

  To last it out and not come back at all.

  I rocked shut

  As a seashell.

  They had to call and call

  And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

  Dying

  Is an art, like everything else.

  I do it exceptionally well.

  I do it so it feels like hell.

  I do it so it feels real.

  I guess you could say I’ve a call.

  It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.

  It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.

  It’s the theatrical

  Comeback in broad day

  To the same place, the same face, the same brute

  Amused shout:

  “A miracle!”

  That knocks me out.

  There is a charge

  For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge

  For the hearing of my heart—

  It really goes.

  And there is a charge, very large charge,

  For a word or a touch

  Or a bit of blood

  Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.

  So, so, Herr Doktor.

  So, Herr Enemy.

  I am your opus,

  I am your valuable,

  The pure gold baby

  That melts to a shriek.

  I turn and burn.

  Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

  Ash, ash—

  You poke and stir.

  Flesh, bone, there is nothing there—

  A cake of soap,

  A wedding ring,

  A gold filling.

  Herr God, Herr Lucifer,

  Beware

  Beware.

  Out of the ash

  I rise with my red hair

  And I eat men like air.

  Alphabetical List of Poets

  Alcott, Louisa May

  Allen, Elizabeth Akers

  Bates, Katharine Lee

  Beers, Ethel Lynn

  Bleecker, Ann Eliza

  Bogan, Louise

  Bradstreet, Anne

  Branch, Anna Hempstead

  Bristol, Augusta Cooper

  Brooks, Gwendolyn

  Brooks, Maria Gowen

  Cary, Alice

  Cary, Phoebe

  Cather, Willa

  Channing-Stetson,

  Grace Ellery

  Child, Lydia Maria

  Cooke, Rose Terry

  Coolbrith, Ina Donna

  Crosby, Fanny

  Davidson, Lucretia

  Dickinson, Emily

  Dodge, Mary Mapes

  Doolittle, Hilda

  Dunbar-Nelson, Alice

  Embury, Emma C.

  Fuller, Margaret

  Gilman, Charlotte Perkins

  Grimké,

  Charlotte L. Forten

  Guiney, Louise Imogen

  Hale, Sarah Josepha

  Hall, Hazel

  Harper, Frances E. W.

  Hewitt, Mary E.

  Howe, Julia Ward

  Jackson, Helen Hunt

  Jewett, Sarah Orne

  Johnson, Georgia Douglas

  Kinney,

  Elizabeth Clementine

  Larcom, Lucy

  Lathrop, Rose Hawthorne

  Lazarus, Emma

  Lowell, Amy

  Millay, Edna St. Vincent

  Monroe, Harriet

&n
bsp; Moore, Marianne

  Morton, Sarah Wentworth

  Moulton, Louise Chandler

  Oakes-Smith, Elizabeth

  Osgood, Frances Sargent

  Parker, Dorothy

  Peabody, Josephine Preston

  Perry, Nora

  Piatt, Sarah Morgan

  Plath, Sylvia

  Reese, Lizette Woodworth

  Rowson, Susanna Haswell

  Sangster, Margaret E.

  Sigourney, Lydia Huntley

  Stowe, Harriet Beecher

  Taggard, Genevieve

  Teasdale, Sara

  Thaxter, Celia

  Thomas, Edith M.

  Thorpe, Rose Hartwick

  Townsend, Mary Ashley

  Trask, Kate Nichols

  Warren, Mercy Otis

  Wharton, Edith

  Wheatley, Phillis

  Whitman, Sarah Helen

  Wilcox, Ella Wheeler

  Willard, Emma Hart

  Woolson,

  Constance Fenimore

  Wylie, Elinor

  Alphabetical List of Titles and First Lines

  Titles are given, in italics, only when distinct from the first lines.

  A bird came down the walk

  A bit of color against the blue

  A black cat among roses

  Above them spread a stranger sky

  Across the narrow beach we flit

  Advice Gratis to Certain Women

  African Chief, The

  After the fierce midsummer all ablaze

  A gentle maiden, whose large loving eyes

  Ah! little flower, upspringing, azure-eyed

  Ah! woman still

  Aidenn

  All Greece hates

  All I could see from where I stood

  “All quiet along the Potomac,” they say

  All things within this fading world hath end

  Almost afraid they led her in

  Along Ancona’s hills the shimmering heat

  A mariner sat on the shrouds one night

  Amber husk

  America

  America, Commerce, and Freedom

  America the Beautiful

  A narrow fellow in the grass

  And, lo! leading a blessed host comes one

  And this was once the realm of Nature, where

  A night: mysterious, tender, quiet, deep

  Answer, The

  Any Woman to a Soldier

  Appraisal

  As by the instrument she took her place

  A single flow’r he sent me, since we met

  As the wind at play with a spark

  A tall tree talking with the wind

  At a Symphony

  At the dead of night by the side of the Sea

  At westward window of a palace gray

  Author to Her Book, The

  A vestal priestess, proudly pure

  Avoid the reeking herd

  A wounded deer leaps highest

  Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight

  Barter

  Battle Hymn of the Republic

  Beauty

  Because I could not stop for Death

  Beds of Fleur-de-lys, The

  Before the Birth of One of Her Children

  Behold, I send thee to the heights of song

  Bell of the Wreck, The

  Bend low, O dusky Night

  Bluebeard’s Closet

  Bright, glowing Sappho! child of love and song!

  Burial of Schlesinger, The

  By the time you swear you’re his

  Caged Bird, A

  Come, my Susan, quit your chamber

  Common Inference, A

  Conservative, A

  Creed

  Crime of the Ages, The

  Curfew Must Not Ring To-Night

  Daddy

  Dancing Girl, A

  Day, in melting purple dying

  Dead Child, The

  Delilah

  Democracy

  Double Standard, A

  Do you blame me that I loved him?

  Dream, A

  Drowned Mariner, The

  Eagle and the Mole, The

  Echoes

  Ellen Learning to Walk

  Emerson

  England’s sun was slowly setting o’er the hill-tops far away

  Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare

  Evening Prospect, An

  Farewell, A

  Far up the lonely mountain-side

  Fasten the chamber!

  Few, in the days of early youth

  First Fig

  First of that train which cursed the wave

  Flaxman

  For Eager Lovers

  For, lo! the living God doth bare his arm

  1492

  Friendship After Love

  From a bright hearth-stone of our land

  Fruitionless

  Garden by Moonlight, The

  Georgia Volunteer, A

  Gifts

  Giving Back the Flower

  God’s World

  Good-by: nay, do not grieve that it is over

  Grandma told me all about it

  Grandmither, think not I forget, when I come back to town

  Grieve Not, Ladies

  Hail, happy saint! on thine immortal throne

  Hail, happy shades! though clad with heavy snows

  Harold the Valiant

  Heard you that shriek? It rose

  Heart of a Woman, The

  Heat

  Heaven is mirrored, Love, deep in thine eyes

  He fumbles at your spirit

  Helen

  Helen Hunt Jackson

  Her Horoscope

  He who plants a tree

  He woos me with those honeyed words

  High at the window in her cage

  High-lying, sea-blown stretches of green turf

  Hope is the thing with feathers

  How blest a life a sailor leads

  How long it seems since that mild April night

  How say that by law we may torture and chase

  Hymn to the Evening, An

  I am weary of the working

  I, being born a woman and distressed

  I believe if I should die

  I do not own an inch of land

  I felt a funeral in my brain

  If ever two were one, then surely we

  If I can stop one heart from breaking

  If thy sad heart, pining for human love

  If to repeat thy name when none may hear me

  I had come to the house, in a cave of trees

  I had forgotten the gesture of branches

  I had no thought of violets of late

  I have done it again

  I have had enough

  I heard a fly buzz when I died

  I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses

  I hoped that he would love me

  I know a story, fairer, dimmer, sadder

  I know it must be winter (though I sleep)

  I’ll not believe the dullard dark

  I looked in my heart while the wild swans went over

  I love my life, but not too well

  I mid the hills was born

  Imitation of Sappho

  I’m nobody! Who are you?

  I never saw a moor

  In every line a supple beauty

  Indian Names

  Indian’s Welcome to the Pilgrim Fathers, The

  Individuality

  Instruction

  Instrumental Music

  In tangled wreaths, in clustered gleaming stars

  In the earnest path of duty

  In the midnight of darkness and terror

  Into her mother’s bedroom to wash the ballooning body

  Into the golden vessel of great song

  I Shall Not Care

  I Sit and Sew

  I sit and sew—a useless task it seems

  I stood and watched the still, mysterious Nightr />
  It lies around us like a cloud

  I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle

  It sings to me in sunshine

  I understand what you were running for

  I walk down the garden paths

  Jessie Mitchell’s Mother

  Kiss, The

  Lady Lazarus

  Last Giustiniani, The

  Late-born and woman-souled I dare not hope

  Laugh, and the world laughs with you

  Learning to Read

  Let deep dejection hide her pallid face

  Let No Charitable Hope

  Letter, The

  Let us walk in the white snow

  Life

  Life has loveliness to sell

  Life, like a marble block, is given to all

  Likeness, A

  Lincoln

  Lines

  Little cramped words scrawling all over the paper

  Look, The

  Louisa May Alcott

  Love-Knot, The

  Love Song

  Love Unexpressed

  Love Unsought

  Medusa

  Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord

  Minuet, The

  Morning-Glory, The

  Mother Who Died Too, The

  My Babes in the Wood

  My beautiful trembler! how wildly she shrinks!

  My candle burns at both ends

  My hands that guide a needle

  My heart has grown rich with the passing of years

  My Last Dance

  My life closed twice before its close

  My Lighthouses

  My mother’s hands are cool and fair

  Nearer Home