topics: |  poetry | translation | anthology

It's a Boy by Nancy Morejon, (Cuba, born 1944)

       	     	      [tr. Kathleen Weaver]
	Between sea-foam and the tide
	his back rises
	while afternoon in solitude
	went down.
	I held his black eyes, like grasses
	among brown Pacific shells.

	I held his fine lips
	like a salt boiling in the sands.

	I held, at last, his incense-chin
	under the sun.

	A boy of the world over me
	and Biblical songs
	modeled his legs, his ankles
	and the grapes of his sex
	and the raining hymns that sprang
	from his mouth
	entwining us like two seafarers
	lashed to the uncertain sails of love.

	In his arms, I live.
	In his hard arms I longed to die
	like a wet bird.

New Face by Alice Walker

I have learned not to worry about love;
but to honor its coming
with all my heart.
To examine the dark mysteries
of the blood
with headless heed and swirl,
to know the rush of feelings
swift and flowing
as water.
The source appears to be
some inexhaustible
spring
within our twin and triple
selves;
the new face I turn up
to you
no one else on earth
has ever
seen.

Whistle, Daughter, Whistle (anon)

"Mother, I long to get married,
	I long to be a bride;
I long to lay by that young man,
  	And close to by his side;
Close to by his side,
	O how happy I should be;
For I'm young and merry and almost weary
	Of my virginity."

"Daughter, I was twenty
	before that I was wed,
And many a long and lonesome mile
	I carried my maidenhead.
"O mother that may be,
	But it's not the case with me;
For I'm young and merry and almost weary
	Of my virginity.

A Women's Issue by Margaret Atwood

                                (p.170)
The woman in the spiked device
that locks around the waist and between
the legs, with holes in it like a tea strainer
is Exhibit A.

The woman in black with a net window
to see through and a four-inch
wooden peg jammed up
between her legs so she can't be raped
is Exhibit B.

Exhibit C is the young girl
dragged into the bush by the midwives
and made to sing while they scrape the flesh
from between her legs, then tie her thighs
till she scabs over and is called healed.
Now she can be married.
For each childbirth they'll cut her
open, then sew her up.
Men like tight women.
The ones that die are carefully buried.

The next exhibit lies flat on her back
while eighty men a night
move through her, ten an hour.
She looks at the ceiling, listens
to the door open and close.
A bell keeps ringing.
Nobody knows how she got here.

You'll notice that what they have in common
is between the legs. Is this
why wars are fought?
Enemy territory, no man's
land, to be entered furtively,
fenced, owned but never surely,
scene of these desperate forays
at midnight, captures
and sticky murders, doctors' rubber gloves
greasy with blood, flesh made inert, the surge
of your own uneasy power.

This is no museum.
Who invented the word love?