She is Fierce

by Ana Sampson

  Grant the fond darkness its mystical way with you;

  Morning returns to us ever too soon.

  Roses unfold, in their loveliness, all for you;

  Blossom the lilies for hope of your glance.

  When you’re awake, all the men go and fall for you –

  Sleep, pretty lady, and give me a chance.

  Dorothy Parker

  To a Proud Beauty

  Imperious fool! think not because you’re fair,

  That you so much above my converse are,

  What though the gallants sing your praises loud,

  And with false plaudits make you vainly proud?

  Though they may tell you all adore your eyes,

  And every heart’s your willing sacrifice;

  Or spin the flatt’ry finer, and persuade

  Your easy vanity, that we were made

  For foils to make your lustre shine more bright,

  And must pay homage to your dazzling light,

  Yet know whatever stories they may tell,

  All you can boast, is, to be pretty well;

  Know too, you stately piece of vanity,

  That you are not alone adored, for I

  Fantastically might mince, and smile, as well

  As you, if airy praise my mind could swell:

  Nor are the loud applauses that I have,

  For a fine face, or things that Nature gave;

  But for acquired parts, a gen’rous mind,

  A pleasing converse, neither nice nor kind:

  When they that strive to praise you most, can say

  No more, but that you’re handsome, brisk and gay:

  Since then my frame’s as great as yours is, why

  Should you behold me with a loathing eye?

  If you at me cast a disdainful eye,

  In biting satire I will rage so high,

  Thunder shall pleasant be to what I’ll write,

  And you shall tremble at my very sight;

  Warned by your danger, none shall dare again

  Provoke my pen to write in such a strain.

  ‘Ephelia’

  A Scherzo: A Shy Person’s Wishes

  With the wasp at the innermost heart of a peach,

  On a sunny wall out of tip-toe reach,

  With the trout in the darkest summer pool,

  With the fern-seed clinging behind its cool

  Smooth frond, in the chink of an aged tree,

  In the woodbine’s horn with the drunken bee,

  With the mouse in its nest in a furrow old,

  With the chrysalis wrapped in its gauzy fold;

  With things that are hidden, and safe, and bold,

  With things that are timid, and shy, and free,

  Wishing to be;

  With the nut in its shell, with the seed in its pod,

  With the corn as it sprouts in the kindly clod,

  Far down where the secret of beauty shows

  In the bulb of the tulip, before it blows;

  With things that are rooted, and firm, and deep,

  Quiet to lie, and dreamless to sleep;

  With things that are chainless, and tameless, and proud,

  With the fire in the jagged thunder-cloud,

  With the wind in its sleep, with the wind in its waking,

  With the drops that go to the rainbow’s making,

  Wishing to be with the light leaves shaking,

  Or stones in some desolate highway breaking;

  Far up on the hills, where no foot surprises

  The dew as it falls, or the dust as it rises;

  To be couched with the beast in its torrid lair,

  Or drifting on ice with the polar bear,

  With the weaver at work at his quiet loom;

  Anywhere, anywhere, out of this room!

  Dora Greenwell

  Mirror

  I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.

  Whatever I see I swallow immediately

  Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.

  I am not cruel, only truthful –

  The eye of a little god, four-cornered.

  Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.

  It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long

  I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.

  Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

  Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,

  Searching my reaches for what she really is.

  Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.

  I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.

  She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.

  I am important to her. She comes and goes.

  Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.

  In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman

  Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

  Sylvia Plath

  A Poet Advises a Change of Clothes

  Why wears my lady a trailing gown,

  And the spurious gleam of a stage queen’s crown?

  Let her leap to a horse, and be off to the down!

  Astride, let her ride

  For the sake of my pride,

  That she is more ancient than Diana –

  Ancient as that she-ape who, lurking among trees,

  Dropt on a grazing zebra, gript him with her knees

  And was off across the breadths of the savannah;

  Barking her primal merry deviltry,

  Barking in forecast of her son’s sovereignty.

  My timeless lady is as old as she,

  And she is moderner moreover

  Than Broadway, or an airship, or than Paris lingerie.

  O my eternal dominating dear,

  How much less dated thou than Guinevere!

  Then for your living lover

  Change your gown,

  And don your queenship when you doff your crown.

  Anna Wickham

  Tough Dragons

  She draws the cliffs of Llanberis and sends it to

  the only person who would cry and understand.

  It’s morning and she can still feel the day in her hands.

  The morning she stood up to her father,

  she trembled, wearing a scarf from Morocco:

  This place is my bones; I don’t care if you don’t like it.

  He said:

  You are fiercely intelligent and when you figure out how

  to use them, your words will slay the toughest of dragons.

  She clears her wardrobe, giving away clothes

  she doesn’t recognize herself in.

  Selina Nwulu

  Homage to My Hips

  these hips are big hips

  they need space to

  move around in.

  they don’t fit into little

  petty places, these hips

  are free hips.

  they don’t like to be held back.

  these hips have never been enslaved,

  they go where they want to go

  they do what they want to do.

  these hips are mighty hips.

  these hips are magic hips.

  i have known them

  to put a spell on a man and

  spin him like a top!

  Lucille Clifton

  My Body

  My body is the garden I grew up in,

  with tree-trunk legs,

  lungs made of rose bushes.

  My ribs are a bird cage,

  my skin has a sunflower glow.

  I have planted vines that wrap up my arms and

  around my thighs.

  One day I will teach my children to climb them.

  My hair is the ocean,

  every curl another wave

  to hit the shore of my neck,

  every freckle a star in the galaxy.

  I am constellations.

  My shoulders are bird’s wings,


  my eyes pearls found in a sea of storms.

  My stretchmarks are lightning bolts

  that show I can survive growth.

  Abigail Cook

  And then he said: When did your arms get so big?

  Oh honeybunch, they’re not big,

  they’re fat – and every wibbly inch

  a rich memory card. This quarter turn

  under the left arm, this alabaster,

  is the Boston pie last summer,

  strident and merciless

  and this by my elbow

  is the most perfect jam doughnut

  I ever had, its sugar curtain

  parting, the command performance

  stroking my tongue,

  its belly dancer middle

  jewelled and shadow dancing

  with my teeth.

  But this here, this favour under my arm

  was the perfect cream eclair –

  oh my dear, the parting of the slice

  and pastry, a thousand naked

  wind blown men running bobbly

  through the lawns of the National Trust

  in Surrey, the ladies in the kitchen

  pressing, pressing, into the dough.

  Kristina Close

  Poem in Which My Legs Are Accepted

  Legs!

  How we have suffered each other,

  never meeting the standards of magazines

  or official measurements.

  I have hung you from trapezes,

  sat you on wooden rollers,

  pulled and pushed you

  with the anxiety of taffy,

  and still, you are yourselves!

  Most obvious imperfection, blight on my fantasy life,

  strong,

  plump,

  never to be skinny

  or even hinting of the svelte beauties in history books

  or Sears catalogues.

  Here you are – solid, fleshy and

  white as when I first noticed you, sitting on the toilet,

  spread softly over the wooden seat,

  having been with me only twelve years,

  yet

  as obvious as the legs of my thirty-year-old gym teacher.

  Legs!

  O that was the year we did acrobatics in the annual gym show.

  How you split for me!

  One-handed cartwheels

  from this end of the gymnasium to the other,

  ending in double splits,

  legs you flashed in blue rayon slacks my mother bought

  for the occasion

  and tho you were confidently swinging along,

  the rest of me blushed at the sound of clapping.

  Legs!

  How I have worried about you, not able to hide you,

  embarrassed at beaches, in highschool

  when the cheerleaders’ slim brown legs

  spread all over

  the sand

  with the perfection

  of bamboo.

  I hated you, and still you have never given out on me.

  With you

  I have risen to the top of blue waves,

  with you

  I have carried food home as a loving gift

  when my arms began

  unjelling like madrilene.

  Legs, you are a pillow,

  white and plentiful with feathers for his wild head.

  You are the endless scenery

  behind the tense sinewy elegance of his two dark legs.

  You welcome him joyfully

  and dance.

  And you will be the locks in a new canal between continents.

  The ship of life will push out of you

  and rejoice

  in the whiteness,

  in the first floating and rising of water.

  Kathleen Fraser

  Not Andromeda

  I cannot hang damselled in the night sky for you

  lunar, the translucent lilt

  of alabaster skin, slender arms,

  fingers which taper to vanishing points

  and, like hot glass, slowly fold into place,

  sitting quietly. I cannot grow legs which

  slide, waxen, down your glance

  with tiny feet bound

  to a pulp and my bones

  do not quiver with fear

  in egg shell threads, stitched together

  in diminuendo of the waist and a fine needlework

  of the voice.

  I cannot be Andromeda.

  As a mortal I do not require your worship, nor your

  offerings at my feet to guarantee you

  a rich harvest. The corners of your plinth bruise

  my dappling of cellulite, pomegranate

  flesh, clay left

  with the impressions of

  a creator’s thumbs. I possess

  a body full and strong, folding like an artery

  or a root feasting, sunk in earth – rough, furrowed,

  rashed with lichen.

  If I am celestial at all, it is because

  we were both drawn

  from the same flaming blood, a light shed

  from the first sighs of the stars.

  Let us grasp each other’s shoulders.

  Let us share a look of understanding.

  Let me be a brother to you, even though

  I am not a man.

  Katie Byford

  ‘But still, like air, I rise’ – Courage, Protest and Resistance

  Women have always written protest poetry. Female poets campaigned in verse for equality in marriage and in society, fighting with words – and in the case of many of these poets, brave action – against slavery, segregation and sexism among other evils. We cannot assume that the writers of the past would recognize or fully embrace our own beliefs, but for many the act of publishing poetry was a rebellion in itself. It is a woman – Emma Lazarus – whose words grace the Statue of Liberty, and the verses in this section demonstrate the readiness of female writers to defend the downtrodden.

  The often ignored contribution of women to the abolition of slavery and the fight for civil rights is here celebrated in the words of extraordinary writers including the freed slave Sojourner Truth and the activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Only a handful of women are generally included in war poetry anthologies, but here are searing verses from Charlotte Mew on the First World War and Colette Bryce on the Troubles in Belfast, among others. There are protests against gender inequality that date back many hundreds of years.

  These brave and brilliant words of courage – some serious, a few lighthearted – are wonderful to read and even better learned by heart.

  ‘Hope’ is the Thing with Feathers

  ‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers –

  That perches in the soul –

  And sings the tune without the words –

  And never stops – at all –

  And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –

  And sore must be the storm –

  That could abash the little Bird

  That kept so many warm –

  I’ve heard it in the chillest land –

  And on the strangest Sea –

  Yet, never, in Extremity,

  It asked a crumb – of Me.

  Emily Dickinson

  The New Colossus

  Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

  With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

  Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

  A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

  Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

  Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

  Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

  The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

  ‘Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!’ cries she

  With silent lips. ‘Give me your tired, your poor,

  Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

&
nbsp; The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

  Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

  I lift my lamp beside the golden door!’

  Emma Lazarus

  Ain’t I a Woman?

  That man over there say

  a woman needs to be helped into carriages

  and lifted over ditches

  and to have the best place everywhere.

  Nobody ever helped me into carriages

  or over mud puddles

  or gives me a best place . . .

  And ain’t I a woman?

  Look at me

  Look at my arm!

  I have plowed and planted

  and gathered into barns

  and no man could head me . . .

  And ain’t I a woman?

  I could work as much

  and eat as much as a man –

  when I could get to it –

  and bear the lash as well

  and ain’t I a woman?

  I have born thirteen children

  and seen most all sold into slavery

  and when I cried out a mother’s grief

  none but Jesus heard me . . .

  And ain’t I a woman?

  that little man in black there say

  a woman can’t have as much rights as a man

  cause Christ wasn’t a woman

  Where did your Christ come from?

  From God and a woman!

  Man had nothing to do with him!

  If the first woman God ever made

  was strong enough to turn the world

  upside down, all alone

  together women ought to be able to turn it

  rightside up again.

  Sojourner Truth

  Protest

  To sin by silence, when we should protest,

  Makes cowards out of men. The human race

  Has climbed on protest. Had no voice been raised

  Against injustice, ignorance, and lust,

  The inquisition yet would serve the law,

  And guillotines decide our least disputes.

  The few who dare, must speak and speak again

  To right the wrongs of many. Speech, thank God,

  No vested power in this great day and land

  Can gag or throttle. Press and voice may cry

  Loud disapproval of existing ills;