The Moon Is Always Female Quotes

“If I die this instant will you be more content with the morning news? Will your coffee taste better? I am not your fate. I am not your government…I am not your mother, not your father or your nightmare or your health. I am not a fence, not a wall. I am not the law or actuarial tables of your insurance broker. I am a woman with my guts loose in my hands, howling and it’s not because I committed hari-kiri. I suggest either you cook me or sew me back up. I suggest you walk into my pain as into the breaking waves of an ocean of blood, and either we will climb out together and walk away.”
― Marge Piercy, The Moon Is Always Female: Poems

“Snow lies on my fields
though the air is so warm I want
to roll on my back and wriggle.
Sure, the dark downhill weep shows
who’s winning, and the thatch of tall
grass is sticking out of the banks,
but I want to start digging and planting.
My swelling hills, my leafbrown loamy
soil interlaced with worms red as mouths,
my garden,
why don’t you hurry up
and take your clothes off ?”
― Marge Piercy, The Moon Is Always Female: Poems

“To have without holding

Learning to love differently is hard,
love with the hands wide open, love
with the doors banging on their hinges,
the cupboard unlocked, the wind
roaring and whimpering in the rooms
rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds
that thwack like rubber bands
in an open palm.

It hurts to love wide open
stretching the muscles that feel
as if they are made of wet plaster,
then of blunt knives, then
of sharp knives.

It hurts to thwart the reflexes
of grab, of clutch ; to love and let
go again and again. It pesters to remember
the lover who is not in the bed,
to hold back what is owed to the work
that gutters like a candle in a cave
without air, to love consciously,
conscientiously, concretely, constructively.

I can’t do it, you say it’s killing
me, but you thrive, you glow
on the street like a neon raspberry,
You float and sail, a helium balloon
bright bachelor’s button blue and bobbing
on the cold and hot winds of our breath,
as we make and unmake in passionate
diastole and systole the rhythm
of our unbound bonding, to have
and not to hold, to love
with minimized malice, hunger
and anger moment by moment balanced.”
― Marge Piercy, The Moon Is Always Female: Poems

“I find it easy to admire in trees what depresses me in people.”
― Marge Piercy, The Moon Is Always Female: Poems

“All day you have been on my mind, a steam iron pressing the convolutions from my cortex, ironing me flat. Worrying cooks my cells feverish. I am irritable with love boiling into anxiety, till I grow furious with you, lying under the surgeon’s knife.”
― Marge Piercy, Moon Is Always Female

“A strong woman is a woman in whose head
a voice is repeating, I told you so,
ugly, bad girl, bitch, nag, shrill, witch,
ballbuster, nobody will ever love you
back,
why aren't you feminine, why aren't
you soft, why aren't you quiet, why
aren't you dead?
A strong woman is a woman determined
to do something others are determined
not be done. She is pushing up on the
bottom
of a lead coffin lid. She is trying to raise
a manhole cover with her head, she is
trying
to butt her way through a steel wall.
Her head hurts. People waiting for the
hole
to be made say, hurry, you're so strong.”
― Marge Piercy, The Moon Is Always Female: Poems

“You who had not been allowed to finish
tenth grade but sent to be a frightened
chambermaid, carried home every week
armloads of books from the library
rummaging them late at night, insomniac,

riffling the books like boxes of chocolates
searching for the candied cherries, the nuts,
hunting for the secrets, the formulae,
the knowledge those others learned
that made them shine and never ache.”
― Marge Piercy, The Moon Is Always Female: Poems

“Only rebellion flashes like lightning.”
― Marge Piercy, The Moon Is Always Female: Poems

“In my childhood bed we float, your sweet
husky voice singing about the crescent
moon, with two horns sharp and bright we would
climb into like a boat and row away
and see, you sang, where the pretty moon goes.”
― Marge Piercy, The Moon Is Always Female: Poems

“All day you have been on my mind
A seagull perched on an old wharf
piling by the steely grip of its claws
shrieking when any other comes too near
waiting for fish or what the tide brings
shaking out its long white wings like laundry.

All day you have been on my mind
a thrift store glamour hat that doesn't fit
with a perky veil scratching my cheek
with a feather hanging down like a broken tail.”
― Marge Piercy, The Moon Is Always Female: Poems