The Hunger Moon

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The Hunger Moon Page 22

by Marge Piercy

and let the stars poke

  into our skulls till we seem

  to fall upward. How intimate

  we are now with the night.

  The full moon of Nisan

  The full moon of Nisan pulls us

  almost every Jew under the sky

  to a table. Like a tide composed

  of tiny rivulets we head

  purposefully toward our seders

  laden with the flat tasteless

  bread of haste.

  The moon when it rises looks

  like strawberry ice cream.

  Then it lightens to waxy cheese.

  Then it soars pale and pitted

  like matzoh, the old kind

  round instead of square

  dry and winking.

  Nisan brings the matzoh moon

  urging buds to open, urging

  minds to fling their gates

  wide on the night we become

  slaves and then march out

  to freedom past lintels

  smeared with blood.

  Peace in a time of war

  A puddle of amber light

  like sun spread on a table,

  food flirting savor into the nose,

  faces of friends, a vase

  of daffodils and Dutch iris:

  this is an evening of honey

  on the tongue, cinnamon

  scented, red wine sweet

  and dry, voices rising

  like a flock of swallows

  turning together in evening

  air. Darkness walls off

  the room from what lies

  outside, the fire and dust

  and blood of war, bodies

  stacked like firewood

  burst like overripe melons.

  Ceremony is a moat we have

  crossed into a moment’s

  harmony, as if the world paused—

  but it doesn’t. What we must

  do waits like coats tossed

  on the bed, for us to rise

  from this warm table

  put on again and go out.

  The cup of Eliyahu

  In life you had a temper.

  Your sarcasm was a whetted knife.

  Sometimes you shuddered with fear

  but you made yourself act no matter

  how few stood with you.

  Open the door for Eliyahu

  that he may come in.

  Now you return to us

  in rough times, out of smoke

  and dust that swirls blinding us.

  You come in vision, you come

  in lightning on blackness.

  Open the door for Eliyahu

  that he may come in.

  In every generation you return

  speaking what few want to hear

  words that burn us, that cut

  us loose so we rise and go again

  over the sharp rocks upward.

  Open the door for Eliyahu

  that he may come in.

  You come as a wild man,

  as a homeless sidewalk orator,

  you come as a woman taking the bima,

  you come in prayer and song,

  you come in a fierce rant.

  Open the door for Eliyahu

  that she may come in.

  Prophecy is not a gift, but

  sometimes a curse, Jonah

  refusing. It is dangerous

  to be right, to be righteous.

  To stand against the wall of might.

  Open the door for Eliyahu

  that he may come in.

  There are moments for each

  of us when you summon, when

  you call the whirlwind, when you

  shake us like a rattle: Then we

  too must become you and rise.

  Open the door for Eliyahu

  that we may come in.

  The wind of saying

  The words dance in the wind of saying.

  They are leaves that crispen,

  sere, turning to dust. As long

  as that language runs its blood-

  rich river through the tongues

  of people, as long as grand

  mothers weave the warp and woof

  of old stories with bright new

  words carpeting the air

  into dreams, then the words

  live like good bacteria

  within our guts, feeding us.

  We catch the letters and trap

  them in books, pearlescent butterflies

  pinned down. We fasten the letters

  with nails to the white pages.

  Most words dry finally to husks

  even though dead languages

  whisper, blown sand through

  the dim corridors of library stacks.

  Languages wither, languages

  are arrested and die in prison,

  stories are chopped off at the roots

  like weeds, lullabies spill

  on the floor and dry up.

  Conquerors force their words

  into the minds of their victims.

  Our natural language is a scream.

  Our natural language is a cry

  rattling in the night. But tongues

  are how we touch, how we reach,

  how we teach, the spine of words.

  Some New Poems

  The low road

  What can they do

  to you? Whatever they want.

  They can set you up, they can

  bust you, they can break

  your fingers, they can

  burn your brain with electricity,

  blur you with drugs till you

  can’t walk, can’t remember, they can

  take your child, wall up

  your lover. They can do anything

  you can’t stop them

  from doing. How can you stop

  them? Alone, you can fight,

  you can refuse, you can

  take what revenge you can

  but they roll over you.

  Two people can keep each other

  sane, can give support, conviction,

  love, massage, hope, sex.

  Three people are a delegation,

  a committee, a wedge. With four

  you can play bridge and start

  an organization. With six

  you can rent a whole house,

  eat pie for dinner with no

  seconds and hold a fund-raising party.

  A dozen make a demonstration.

  A hundred fill a hall.

  A thousand have solidarity and your own newsletter;

  ten thousand, power and your own paper;

  a hundred thousand, your own media;

  ten million, your own country.

  It goes on one at a time,

  it starts when you care

  to act, it starts when you do

  it again after they said No,

  it starts when you say We

  and know who you mean, and each

  day you mean one more.

  The curse of Wonder Woman

  Batman can suffer angst in his batcave,

  pester his butler factotum with doubts,

  question his adoption of Robin,

  but Wonder Woman can never waver.

  She must fight, fight, fight without

  recompense. No 3 a.m. nitpicking

  of a festering conscience for her.

  Role models can’t stop to consider.

  Role models can’t whine or take

  to their beds with PMS or enjoy

  a headache with chocolates

  on the couch. Women are watching,

  judging, waiting for the cracks

  in the makeup to show. Role

  models can’t enjoy a fling in Jamaica.

  They don’t get vacations or spas.

  People need and resent role models

  with equal fervor. She’d like to

  retire, but who
else can bounce

  back bullets on a quest for justice?

  She’s stuck in the spotlight impaled

  by duty. Sometimes she half wishes

  to fail and be replaced by some other

  woman without sense to be afraid.

  July Sunday 10 a.m.

  We drink café au lait on the sunporch,

  Puck has dozed off paws in the air

  lying on the rumpled morning paper.

  Through the screens, a scent of roses

  and the repeated cry of a cardinal

  shaped like a sickle. You wear only

  red silk boxers. I wear my thinnest

  nightgown. The air is heavy

  with pollen and the sun sparkles

  on the rhododendrons as if they

  had just been waxed.

  Football for dummies

  Among my husbands and lovers,

  I had never before lived

  with a sports fan. Hockey

  he does not follow, but base-

  ball, basketball, football all

  in their seasons consume him.

  I had to share something:

  baseball is too slow. Basket-

  ball goes on for months

  and months, interminably,

  a herd of skinny giants

  running back and forth mys-

  terious as a flock of swallows

  wheeling together at twilight.

  But football: it’s only sixteen

  Sundays and maybe playoffs.

  That seemed reasonable. I

  bought a book. Now every

  Sunday in season I stare

  avidly while huge millionaires

  collide like rival rhinoceros.

  When we watch the Super

  Bowl with groups of men

  and I explain a nickel

  back they gaze at me

  with esoteric lust. I

  look only at the screen.

  Football, it is mine.

  Murder, unincorporated

  I am of the opinion that almost

  anyone would kill for something—

  an idea, a country on a map or

  in the head, a god or goddess,

  a lover, a child, a hovel, a home.

  A stash of money or drugs,

  a meal, a blanket, medicine,

  personal morality as in kill

  the bitch, a real Picasso

  a mother, a father, prized

  stallion, prize bull, a dog.

  To stay out of prison, to cross

  a border to safety, to cover

  up a lie, a theft, to maintain

  cover, to steal identity.

  Because the gun was in

  the drawer, the ax on the

  table, the chance lay open

  like a switchblade and temper

  sparked a blaze only blood

  could cool. Because

  the sergeant said to.

  Because the others did.

  The happy man

  Pierre-Joseph Redouté painted roses;

  also succulents, lilies, rare tropical

  imports, but most famously, roses.

  He was from a family of journeymen

  painters, never famous, portraits

  to order, flattering of course,

  church and abbey decorations.

  But Redouté painted flowers. He

  looked like a peasant, squarish

  in body, strong with huge mishapen

  hands, not what aristocrats or critics

  expect. But Redouté painted flowers.

  He ambled through courts, Marie

  Antoinette’s play village at Versailles,

  Revolution, Terror, Napoléon. Josephine’s

  triumph and her divorce, Charles X,

  Louis-Philippe, court painter to each

  in turn unfailingly friendly, painting flowers.

  His younger brother drew beetles

  and reptiles instead of court ladies

  or kings, but Redouté painted flowers.

  Money came to him like rain to a garden.

  He drank it in blindly, gave it to others,

  spent it like the water it seemed.

  Always more tomorrow. He grew old,

  unfashionable. Moneylenders sucked

  him dry but he never drooped. Flowers

  were always calling. At the end poor

  but busy, brush in hand he died smiling

  as he painted a perfect white lily.

  Collectors

  Some people collect grudges

  like stamps or rare coins.

  They take out their prize holdings

  to polish till they glow.

  But after a while, it doesn’t work

  any longer, so they need fresh

  ones to cherish the way another

  will groom a champion setter.

  Friendships are expendable

  as last decade’s palazzo pants.

  Rejecting is more fun than

  holding close. So on they go

  their paths littered with torn

  and discarded friendships,

  like bones outside the den

  of a fairy tale giant.

  First sown

  Peas are the first thing we plant

  always. We lie full length

  on the cold black earth and poke

  holes in it for the wrinkled

  old men of the seeds.

  Nothing will happen for weeks.

  Rain will soak them, a white

  tablecloth of snow will cover

  them and be whisked off.

  The moon will sing to them:

  open, loosen, let the pale

  shoots break out. No,

  they are pebbles, they sit

  in the earth like false teeth.

  They ignore the sweet sun.

  Then one unlikely day

  the soil cracks along miniature

  faults and soon baby leaves

  stick out their double heads

  and we know we shall have peas.

  Away with all that

  Where the Herring River meets Wellfleet Bay

  the tide carries brackish water out to sea.

  I arrive with my pants pocket stuffed

  with stale bread. As I tear off each piece

  I name what I am praying will depart.

  Envy and prejudice sink under their own

  weight like hunks of granite. Impatience

  darts out into the bay waters, vanishing

  as a fish rises to gulp it. Procrastination,

  sloth eddy back and forth at waves’ edge.

  Conceit prances out on wave tops.

  Anger and malice bounce off each other

  and sink down onto the sand. Intention

  never carried out simply comes apart.

  It is all me. It is all I wish were not me.

  Wishing won’t do it any more than old

  bread can rid me of what I must pry

  out of myself every day, intention

  that wears through like an old runner

  on stairs I must climb to the top.

  If only I could discard my rotten parts

  as simply as I toss these bits of bread

  too hard to eat onto waves that push,

  push, push my named sins to the bay,

  to bigger bay, out into the world ocean.

  All that remains

  A pillar of salt would slowly dissolve

  in the season of rains, as women

  have so often melted from history

  so many nameless, wife of,

  daughter of, maidservant of.

  Their faces peer out between

  the black logs and squiggles

  of Hebrew letters, as if through

  bars. We were here too, they

  whisper like pages turning,

  pages on which their fates

  are sometimes written, always


  by others. The strongest ones,

  Miriam, Deborah, hold their

  names gripped in their teeth.

  Diving through the letters

  into the white light between

  I seek them out, wife of,

  daughter of, maidservant of—

  their silence deafens me.

  What comes next

  After a hurricane the whine

  of chainsaws cutting into downed trees.

  After a blizzard, whiteout silence

  then the cries of hungry birds.

  After a loss, another kind

  of silence when we are too weary

  to cry, too numb to tackle

  the list of things that must be done.

  The force of what has happened

  flattens us to old rugs

  on which the pattern is only

  memory and their use is past.

  Where dreams come from

  A girl slams the door of her little room

  under the eaves where marauding squirrels

  scamper overhead like herds of ideas.

  She has forgotten to be grateful she has

  finally a room with a door that shuts.

  She is furious her parents don’t comprehend

  why she wants to go to college, that place

  of musical comedy fantasies and weekend

  football her father watches, beer can

  in hand. It is as if she announced I want

  to journey to Iceland or Machu Picchu.

  Nobody in their family goes to college.

  Where do dreams come from? Do they

  sneak in through torn screens at night

  to light on the arm like mosquitoes?

 

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