The Poetry of Sex

Home > Christian > The Poetry of Sex > Page 3
The Poetry of Sex Page 3

by Hannah, Sophie


  If any thing is sacred the human body is sacred,

  And the glory and sweet of a man is the token of manhood untainted,

  And in man or woman a clean, strong, firm-fibred body, is more beautiful

  than the most beautiful face.

  Have you seen the fool that corrupted his own live body? or the fool that corrupted her own live body?

  For they do not conceal themselves, and cannot conceal themselves.

  9

  O my body! I dare not desert the likes of you in other men and women, nor the likes of the parts of you,

  I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes of the soul, (and that they are the soul,)

  I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my poems, and that they are my poems,

  Man’s, woman’s, child’s, youth’s, wife’s, husband’s, mother’s, father’s, young man’s, young woman’s poems,

  Head, neck, hair, ears, drop and tympan of the ears,

  Eyes, eye-fringes, iris of the eye, eyebrows, and the waking or sleeping of the lids,

  Mouth, tongue, lips, teeth, roof of the mouth, jaws, and the jaw-hinges,

  Nose, nostrils of the nose, and the partition,

  Cheeks, temples, forehead, chin, throat, back of the neck, neck-slue,

  Strong shoulders, manly beard, scapula, hind-shoulders, and the ample side-round of the chest,

  Upper-arm, armpit, elbow-socket, lower-arm, arm-sinews, arm-bones,

  Wrist and wrist-joints, hand, palm, knuckles, thumb, forefinger, finger-joints, finger-nails,

  Broad breast-front, curling hair of the breast, breast-bone, breast-side,

  Ribs, belly, backbone, joints of the backbone,

  Hips, hip-sockets, hip-strength, inward and outward round, man-balls, man-root,

  Strong set of thighs, well carrying the trunk above,

  Leg-fibres, knee, knee-pan, upper-leg, under-leg,

  Ankles, instep, foot-ball, toes, toe-joints, the heel;

  All attitudes, all the shapeliness, all the belongings of my or your body or of any one’s body, male or female,

  The lung-sponges, the stomach-sac, the bowels sweet and clean,

  The brain in its folds inside the skull-frame,

  Sympathies, heart-valves, palate-valves, sexuality, maternity,

  Womanhood, and all that is a woman, and the man that comes from woman,

  The womb, the teats, nipples, breast-milk, tears, laughter, weeping, love-looks, love-perturbations and risings,

  The voice, articulation, language, whispering, shouting aloud,

  Food, drink, pulse, digestion, sweat, sleep, walking, swimming,

  Poise on the hips, leaping, reclining, embracing, arm-curving and tightening,

  The continual changes of the flex of the mouth, and around the eyes,

  The skin, the sunburnt shade, freckles, hair,

  The curious sympathy one feels when feeling with the hand the naked meat of the body,

  The circling rivers the breath, and breathing it in and out,

  The beauty of the waist, and thence of the hips, and thence downward toward the knees,

  The thin red jellies within you or within me, the bones and the marrow in the bones,

  The exquisite realization of health;

  O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul,

  O I say now these are the soul!

  Figs

  D. H. Lawrence

  The proper way to eat a fig, in society,

  Is to split it in four, holding it by the stump,

  And open it, so that it is a glittering, rosy, moist, honied, heavy-petalled four-petalled flower.

  Then you throw away the skin

  Which is just like a four-sepalled calyx,

  After you have taken off the blossom, with your lips.

  But the vulgar way

  Is just to put your mouth to the crack, and take out the flesh in one bite.

  Every fruit has its secret.

  The fig is a very secretive fruit.

  As you see it standing growing, you feel at once it is symbolic:

  And it seems male.

  But when you come to know it better, you agree with the Romans, it is female.

  The Italians vulgarly say, it stands for the female part; the fig-fruit:

  The fissure, the yoni,

  The wonderful moist conductivity towards the centre.

  Involved,

  Inturned,

  The flowering all inward and womb-fibrilled;

  And but one orifice.

  The fig, the horse-shoe, the squash-blossom.

  Symbols.

  There was a flower that flowered inward, womb-ward;

  Now there is a fruit like a ripe womb.

  It was always a secret.

  That’s how it should be, the female should always be secret.

  There never was any standing aloft and unfolded on a bough

  Like other flowers, in a revelation of petals;

  Silver-pink peach, venetian green glass of medlars and sorb-apples,

  Shallow wine-cups on short, bulging stems

  Openly pledging heaven:

  Here’s to the thorn in flower! Here is to Utterance!

  The brave, adventurous rosaceæ.

  Folded upon itself, and secret unutterable,

  And milky-sapped, sap that curdles milk and makes ricotta,

  Sap that smells strange on your fingers, that even goats won’t taste it;

  Folded upon itself, enclosed like any Mohammedan woman,

  Its nakedness all within-walls, its flowering forever unseen,

  One small way of access only, and this close-curtained from the light;

  Fig, fruit of the female mystery, covert and inward,

  Mediterranean fruit, with your covert nakedness,

  Where everything happens invisible, flowering and fertilization, and fruiting

  In the inwardness of your you, that eye will never see

  Till it’s finished, and you’re over-ripe, and you burst to give up your ghost.

  Till the drop of ripeness exudes,

  And the year is over.

  And then the fig has kept her secret long enough.

  So it explodes, and you see through the fissure the scarlet.

  And the fig is finished, the year is over.

  That’s how the fig dies, showing her crimson through the purple slit

  Like a wound, the exposure of her secret, on the open day.

  Like a prostitute, the bursten fig, making a show of her secret.

  That’s how women die too.

  The year is fallen over-ripe,

  The year of our women.

  The year of our women is fallen over-ripe.

  The secret is laid bare.

  And rottenness soon sets in.

  The year of our women is fallen over-ripe.

  When Eve once knew in her mind that she was naked

  She quickly sewed fig-leaves, and sewed the same for the man.

  She’d been naked all her days before,

  But till then, till that apple of knowledge, she hadn’t had the fact on her mind.

  She got the fact on her mind, and quickly sewed fig-leaves.

  And women have been sewing ever since.

  But now they stitch to adorn the bursten fig, not to cover it.

  They have their nakedness more than ever on their mind,

  And they won’t let us forget it.

  Now, the secret

  Becomes an affirmation through moist, scarlet lips

  That laugh at the Lord’s indignation.

  What then, good Lord! cry the women.

  We have kept our secret long enough.

  We are a ripe fig.

  Let us burst into affirmation.

  They forget, ripe figs won’t keep.

  Ripe figs won’t keep.

  Honey-white figs of the north, black figs with scarlet inside, of the south.

  Ripe
figs won’t keep, won’t keep in any clime.

  What then, when women the world over have all bursten into affirmation?

  And bursten figs won’t keep?

  Animal, Vegetable, Mineral

  Naomi Foyle

  With wincing scissors

  he trims my chestnut bush,

  saving tufts of old growth

  for burning on the heath.

  When I’m bristling

  like a coconut,

  he lathers up the shaving brush

  on a coin of Fenland soap –

  surrounding my mound

  with foam,

  and scraping his razor

  into the scree,

  he draws a vulpine muzzle

  down upon my lips.

  My clit sticks out pink

  like a tongue tip

  as with my gummy muscles

  I grip his index finger:

  hungry as a fox cub

  nursed by a human mother.

  Eve to the Serpent

  Catherine Smith

  Stretched on tiptoes, knowing

  your eyes are flickering over me –

  at my sex especially – look

  how I twist the stalk

  and snap – pluck it carefully,

  because it is precious,

  unblemished, and wrong.

  I’ve never been more curious

  than this. I think about the skin,

  how my teeth will rip into it,

  about the flesh, how clean

  and white it will be, how luscious.

  You told me, didn’t you? –

  it will be the most delicious thing

  I’ve ever put in my mouth,

  its juice a drizzle of nectar.

  It will do me so much good.

  I might just stand here with it

  in my hand, while you writhe

  and sweat in your ornamental skin,

  your tongue quivering. This could be

  the longest afternoon of our lives.

  A Woman Waits for Me

  Walt Whitman

  A woman waits for me, she contains all, nothing is lacking,

  Yet all were lacking if sex were lacking, or if the moisture of the right man were lacking.

  Sex contains all, bodies, souls,

  Meanings, proofs, purities, delicacies, results, promulgations,

  Songs, commands, health, pride, the maternal mystery, the seminal milk,

  All hopes, benefactions, bestowals, all the passions, loves, beauties, delights of the earth,

  All the governments, judges, gods, follow’d persons of the earth,

  These are contain’d in sex as parts of itself and justifications of itself.

  Without shame the man I like knows and avows the deliciousness of his sex,

  Without shame the woman I like knows and avows hers.

  Now I will dismiss myself from impassive women,

  I will go stay with her who waits for me, and with those women that are warm-blooded sufficient for me,

  I see that they understand me and do not deny me,

  I see that they are worthy of me, I will be the robust husband of those women.

  They are not one jot less than I am,

  They are tann’d in the face by shining suns and blowing winds,

  Their flesh has the old divine suppleness and strength,

  They know how to swim, row, ride, wrestle, shoot, run, strike, retreat, advance, resist, defend themselves,

  They are ultimate in their own right – they are calm, clear, well-possess’d of themselves.

  I draw you close to me, you women,

  I cannot let you go, I would do you good,

  I am for you, and you are for me, not only for our own sake, but for others’ sakes,

  Envelop’d in you sleep greater heroes and bards,

  They refuse to awake at the touch of any man but me.

  It is I, you women, I make my way,

  I am stern, acrid, large, undissuadable, but I love you,

  I do not hurt you any more than is necessary for you,

  I pour the stuff to start sons and daughters fit for these States, I press with slow rude muscle,

  I brace myself effectually, I listen to no entreaties,

  I dare not withdraw till I deposit what has so long accumulated within me.

  Through you I drain the pent-up rivers of myself,

  In you I wrap a thousand onward years,

  On you I graft the grafts of the best-beloved of me and America,

  The drops I distil upon you shall grow fierce and athletic girls, new artists, musicians, and singers,

  The babes I beget upon you are to beget babes in their turn,

  I shall demand perfect men and women out of my love-spendings,

  I shall expect them to interpenetrate with others,

  as I and you interpenetrate now,

  I shall count on the fruits of the gushing showers of them,

  as I count on the fruits of the gushing showers I give now,

  I shall look for loving crops from the birth, life, death,

  immortality, I plant so lovingly now.

  My Black Triangle

  Grace Nichols

  My black triangle

  sandwiched between the geography of my thighs

  Is a Bermuda

  of tiny atoms

  forever seizing

  and releasing

  the world

  My black triangle

  is so rich

  that it flows over

  on to the dry crotch

  of the world

  My black triangle

  is black light

  sitting on the threshold

  of the world

  Overlooking deep-pink

  probabilities

  and though

  it spares a thought

  for history

  my black triangle

  has spread beyond his story

  beyond the dry fears of parch-ri-archy

  spreading and growing

  trusting and flowering

  my black triangle

  carries the seal of approval

  of my deepest self

  2

  ‘ALSO THOSE DESIRES GLOWING OPENLY’

  ‘If you were coming in the fall’

  Emily Dickinson

  If you were coming in the fall,

  I’d brush the summer by

  With half a smile and half a spurn,

  As housewives do a fly.

  If I could see you in a year,

  I’d wind the months in balls,

  And put them each in separate drawers,

  Until their time befalls.

  If only centuries delayed,

  I’d count them on my hand,

  Subtracting till my fingers dropped

  Into Van Diemen’s land.

  If certain, when this life was out,

  That yours and mine should be,

  I’d toss it yonder like a rind,

  And taste eternity.

  But now, all ignorant of the length

  Of time’s uncertain wing,

  It goads me, like the goblin bee,

  That will not state its sting.

  ‘First, I want to make you come in my hand’

  Marilyn Hacker

  First, I want to make you come in my hand

  while I watch you and kiss you, and if you cry,

  I’ll drink your tears while, with my whole hand, I

  hold your drenched loveliness contracting. And

  after a breath, I want to make you full

  again, and wet. I want to make you come

  in my mouth like a storm. No tears now. The sum

  of your parts is my whole most beautiful

  chart of the constellations – your left breast

  in my mouth again. You know you’ll have to be

  your age. As I lie beside you, cover me

  like a gold cloud, hands every
where, at last

  inside me where I trust you, then your tongue

  where I need you. I want you to make me come.

  Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae

  Ernest Dowson

  Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine

  There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed

  Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;

  And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,

  Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head:

  I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

  All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat,

  Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay;

  Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet;

  But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,

  When I awoke and found the dawn was gray:

  I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

  I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,

  Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,

  Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;

  But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,

  Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:

  I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

  I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,

  But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,

  Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;

  And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,

  Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:

  I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

  I Feel

  Elizabeth Jennings

 

‹ Prev