Women poems
/ page 131 of 142 /
Market days
© Jonas Mekas
Mondays, way before dawn,
before even the first hint of blue in the windows,
we'd hear it start, off the road past our place,
over on the highway nearby,
in a clatter of market-bound traffic.
Villages and Plains the Streams Flow Through
© Jonas Mekas
to carry on the songs of washerwomen,
fishermen's nets and grey wooden bridges.
Clear blue nights, smelling warm,
streams of thin mist off the meadow drift in
with distinct hoof-stomps from a fettered horse.
Nothing Stays Put
© Amy Clampitt
In memory of Father Flye, 1884-1985
The strange and wonderful are too much with us.
The protea of the antipodesa great,
globed, blazing honeybee of a bloom
No Fault In Women
© Robert Herrick
No fault in women, to refuse
The offer which they most would chuse.
--No fault: in women, to confess
How tedious they are in their dress;
Yes, the Dead Speak to Us
© Carl Sandburg
YES, the Dead speak to us.
This town belongs to the Dead, to the Dead and to the Wilderness.
Back of the clamps on a fireproof door they hold the papers of the Dead in a house here
Working Girls
© Carl Sandburg
THE working girls in the morning are going to work--
long lines of them afoot amid the downtown stores
and factories, thousands with little brick-shaped
lunches wrapped in newspapers under their arms.
Women Washing Their Hair
© Carl Sandburg
THEY have painted and sung
the women washing their hair,
and the plaits and strands in the sun,
and the golden combs
Two Items
© Carl Sandburg
STRONG rocks hold up the riksdag bridge
always strong river waters shoving their shoulders against them
In the riksdag to-night three hundred men are talking to each other about more potatoes and bread for the Swedish people to eat this winter.
In a boat among calm waters next to the running waters a fisherman sits in the dark and I, leaning at a parapet, see him lift a net and let it down
he waits
the waters run
the riksdag talks
he lifts the net and lets it down
Stars lost in the sky ten days of drizzle spread over the sky saying yes-yes.
To a Contemporary Bunkshooter
© Carl Sandburg
You come along squirting words at us, shaking your fist
and calling us all damn fools so fierce the froth slobbers
over your lips. . . always blabbing we're all
going to hell straight off and you know all about it.
The Red Son
© Carl Sandburg
I LOVE your faces I saw the many years
I drank your milk and filled my mouth
With your home talk, slept in your house
And was one of you.
Streets Too Old
© Carl Sandburg
I WALKED among the streets of an old city and the streets were lean as the throats of hard seafish soaked in salt and kept in barrels many years.
How old, how old, how old, we are:the walls went on saying, street walls leaning toward each other like old women of the people, like old midwives tired and only doing what must be done.
The greatest the city could offer me, a stranger, was statues of the kings, on all corners bronzes of kingsancient bearded kings who wrote books and spoke of Gods love for all peopleand young kings who took forth armies out across the frontiers splitting the heads of their opponents and enlarging their kingdoms.
Strangest of all to me, a stranger in this old city, was the murmur always whistling on the winds twisting out of the armpits and fingertips of the kings in bronze:Is there no loosening? Is this for always?
In an early snowflurry one cried:Pull me down where the tired old midwives no longer look at me, throw the bronze of me to a fierce fire and make me into neckchains for dancing children.
Stars, Songs, Faces
© Carl Sandburg
GATHER the stars if you wish it so.
Gather the songs and keep them.
Gather the faces of women.
Gather for keeping years and years.
Soiled Dove
© Carl Sandburg
Let us be honest; the lady was not a harlot until she
married a corporation lawyer who picked her from
a Ziegfeld chorus.
Before then she never took anybody's money and paid
Snow
© Carl Sandburg
SNOW took us away from the smoke valleys into white mountains, we saw velvet blue cows eating a vermillion grass and they gave us a pink milk.
Snow changes our bones into fog streamers caught by the wind and spelled into many dances.
Smoke and Steel
© Carl Sandburg
SMOKE of the fields in spring is one,
Smoke of the leaves in autumn another.
Smoke of a steel-mill roof or a battleship funnel,
They all go up in a line with a smokestack,
Savoir Faire
© Carl Sandburg
CAST a bronze of my head and legs and put them on the kings street.
Set the cast of me here alongside Carl XII, making two Carls for the Swedish people and the utlanders to look at between the palace and the Grand Hotel.
The summer sun will shine on both the Carls, and November drizzles wrap the two, one in tall leather boots, one in wool leggins.
Also I place it in the record: the Swedish people may name boats after me or change the name of a long street and give it one of my nicknames.
Remembered Women
© Carl Sandburg
FOR a womans face remembered as a spot of quick light on the flat land of dark night,
For this memory of one mouth and a forehead they go on in the gray rain and the mud, they go on among the boots and guns.
The horizon ahead is a thousand fang flashes, it is a row of teeth that bite on the flanks of night, the horizon sings of a new kill and a big kill.
The horizon behind is a wall of dark etched with a memory, fixed with a womans facethey fight on and on, boots in the mud and heads in the gray rainfor the women they hate and the women they lovefor the women they left behind, they fight on.
Prairie
© Carl Sandburg
I WAS born on the prairie and the milk of its wheat, the red of its clover, the eyes of its women, gave me a song and a slogan.
Here the water went down, the icebergs slid with gravel, the gaps and the valleys hissed, and the black loam came, and the yellow sandy loam.
Here between the sheds of the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians, here now a morning star fixes a fire sign over the timber claims and cow pastures, the corn belt, the cotton belt, the cattle ranches.
Portrait of a Motor Car
© Carl Sandburg
ITS a lean car
a long-legged dog of a car
a gray-ghost eagle car.
The feet of it eat the dirt of a road
the wings of it eat the hills.
Danny the driver dreams of it when he sees women in red skirts and red sox in his sleep.
It is in Dannys life and runs in the blood of him
a lean gray-ghost car.
Portrait
© Carl Sandburg
(For S. A.)TO write one book in five years
or five books in one year,
to be the painter and the thing painted,
where are we, bo?
