Tag Archives: Great Poems or Pieces Thereof

Amazon in the land of oranges—Joan Larkin

Posted on by
2

Some Unsaid Things
Joan Larkin, Amazon Poetry, 1975

I was not going to say
how you lay with me

nor where your hands went
& left their light impressions

nor whose face was white
as a splash of moonlight

nor who spilled the wine
nor whose blood stained the sheet

nor which one of us wept
to set the dark bed rocking

nor what you took me for
nor what I took you for

nor how your fingertips
in me were roots

light roots torn leaves put down—
nor what you tore from me

nor what confusion came
of our twin names

nor will I say whose body
opened, sucked, whispered

like the ocean, unbalancing
what had seemed a safe position

On a June Morning, I Would Head for Your Scent

Posted on by
1

This is the third themed liturgical weaving I’ve done, taking lines from many different poets and using them to create a new piece designed to be read aloud as part of the morning prayer service in the Feminist, non-Zionist havurah I co-lead. Done right, poetry makes damn fine prayer, and this way of reading with single voices and group response is, honestly, something I learned from the Episcopalians and wow does it work in a group.

On a June Morning, I Would Head for Your Scent

a mosaic with words from Genesis, Basho, Mary Oliver, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Emily Dickinson, Sara Teasdale, Susan Windle, Ben Johnson, Li-Young Lee, Antonio Machado, Joan Larkin, Jane Hirshfield, Carl Sandburg, Sharon Olds, John Ciardi, Anne Marie Macari, Carol Burbank, and inspiration from Robert Bly and Alicia Ostriker
woven by Elliott batTzedek

ALL:
On a June morning,
any June morning

READER:
On a June morning,
any June morning,
moving about in my garden
in a breezy time of day,
I keep watch for You,
I follow silver slug lines,
sniffing for Your trail,
I call out “Where are You?”

READER
And a bee
staggers out
of the peony.

READER:
There is a dark hum among the roses,
a murmuring of innumerable bees,
and to the murmur of bees—
a witchcraft—I yield
to my desire for You.

ALL:
On a June morning,
any June morning

READER:
If I were a bee and You
a flower,
I would head for Your scent,
oh my beloved,
I would land on Your petals
held wide apart,
flinging myself down wildly,
tumbling to the bottom of Your cup.
There such sustenance,
You feeding me because only I
can ripen all this fertile exuberance,
food for those not yet born.

READER:
Would You let me go, pantaloons heavy
with gold and sunlight?
Or would You close Your petals,
dissolving me slowly
into Your heart?

ALL:
On a June morning,
any June morning

READER:
And if You were the bee,
would You come to me,
fill Your small body
from this place, my source,
and moan in happiness?

READER:
We are alike, You and I,
each created as the image of the other.
We fly from blossom to sweet
impossible blossom,
bartering pollen for nectar,
making honey from the roses,
honey from the rosemary, honey from the clover,
honey from the peach blossoms,
honey from the red and willing bee balm.

READER:
What honey would You make
from me?

READER:
What honey could I make of You?

ALL:
Can we make honey from our failures?
Honey from our bitterness,
honey from the bare fields
of our hearts?

READER:
Rough, this world is,
yet our soft tongues cut it open,
and the sanity of honey pours out between,
where meaning lives,

READER:
where honey, that gold soup
made of sex and light,
flows shining proof enough of the need
of each of ten thousand flights.

READER:
Every June morning
I pause to listen
for what I live to hear.
I watch the bees go honey-hunting with yellow blur of wings,
and, delirious with desire
I dance directions to my heart.

ALL:
I know that You will come-
it is Your duty
to find things to love
to bind Yourself to this world.

Amazon in the land of oranges—Eleanor Lerman

Posted on by
Reply

Finally I See Your Skin
Eleanor Lerman in Amazon Poetry, 1975

Finally I see your skin so scarred
by my use that I can close my eyes and tell you
where the constant embrace of my fingers is turned to gold
on your stomach, and the press of my legs
has turned your thighs to polished glass
No one else thinks of touching you now
Your body mentions me in all its movements
and has come to fit only my hands

I once told you that I had celestial information
cut on the inside of my mouth and it was years
before you wore it smooth enough to keep from
bleeding your tongue
Mindful of this
you come to kiss me one morning and find
I am old and brittle and pure
my mouth cracks open and planets start to pour out
universes form and begin to show
signs of life

Amazon in the land of oranges—Marcie Hershman

Posted on by
Reply

Making Love to Alice
Marcie Hershman
from Amazon Poetry, 1975

I imagine Gertrude making love to Alice
her generous and wise mouth upon her
breast her arms around hers the two
bodies fitting together, strangely
they are different and wonderfully they are
together. Gertrude being warm and full and
with Alice and Alice being warm and full with
Gertrude who is with her and the way
she is with her. Laughing, I imagine
they must know each other, the two, the one.

It is as with you and I. It is
with us as them. She then she and you then i
imagine. And in the act of imagining
make love to love to love to love

Amazon in the land of oranges—Martha Courtot

Posted on by
Reply

i am a woman in ice
Martha Courtot

i am a woman in ice
melting

piece by piece
slowly
i am divested
of the cold cage

sharp as glass
the splinters fall at my feet
do not cut yourself

when i listen
to the trains wail
i can feel
through underground caverns
of stalactal promises

the earth
full and steady
under me
move

i never thought
i’d love the sun again
but now my fingers move
in a panic
of wanting to be burnt.

Amazon Poetry in a land of oranges

Posted on by
1

I’ve been re-reading the anthology Amazon Poetry, edited by Joan Larkin and Elly Bulkin and published in 1975 by Out and Out Books. It is the first-ever openly lesbian poetry collection. Wow. First ever. For everyone who’s come out post-Ellen, stop to consider this—a time when there was no such thing as a collection of writing by out lesbian poets.

Reading it again, at the end of my third MFA semester when Joan Larkin has been my mentor, is fascinating. When I first found it, probably sometime in the mid-1980’s and probably on Mari’s bookshelf, I didn’t fully get what it meant for these women to be willing to be published in a lesbian anthology, because the writers I knew I already knew as lesbian writers. But for established poets, already grasping legitimacy by muscled fingers in a world where poetry journals had unofficial but strict quotas for how many women they’d publish, this was huge. One of the poets who agreed to be in this anthology, May Swenson, declined to be in Larkin and Bulkin’s next book, Lesbian Poetry, because the title seemed to confine these writers to a label. Which is a complicated issue, of course. What makes a poet a “lesbian poet”? What makes a poem a “lesbian poem”?

The answers to those were easy when I was just coming out. Lesbian poets were poets who lived, wrote, published, breathed, and slept in The Lesbian Community. Lesbian poems were poems about those experiences. Simple, right? So those are the poems I remember from Amazon Poetry, probably skipping the ones that didn’t seem to be “about lesbians.” Ah, youth. Or maybe just arrogance of a kind. Or maybe I was just so hungry for talk about lesbians that I wasn’t then ready to hear talk by lesbians.

Coming back to the book, I’m reading it for the damn fine poetry that it contains—which was exactly the point of the editors to start with. Not to make a ghetto for identity, but to show the range and depth of lesbian experience as captured by a few lesbian writers. In the 80’s, I read as lesbian who also wrote some poetry. Now I’m reading as a lesbian poet. Or maybe a poet lesbian. Definitely reading as a poet. Who is definitely a lesbian. How those identity boundaries are more porous all the time.

I’m going to be posting some of the poems from the anthology that are now my favorites, on this nearly 25th anniversary return to roots built before I came out (I was 11 in 1975, fyi). But let’s start with this one, which I loved then, was delighted to rediscover, and still love, from Elsa Gidlow, born in 1893 and happy, in 1975, to be an out 82 year old lesbian writer:

You say I am mysterious.
Let me explain myself:
In a land of oranges
I am faithful to apples

especially wild and sweet

Posted on by
1

from Alice Hoffman’s YA novel Green Angel

My sister, Aurora, could never sit still and pay attention. She chased after frogs, she trailed her prettiest dresses through the mud, she stole apples from our neighbor’s orchard, she laughed so hard whenever her snappy little terrier, Onion, danced on his hind legs, we thought she’d never come to her senses. Aurora didn’t listen to a word my mother said. We all knew she couldn’t stay in one place any longer than moonlight could. Every time she ran through the garden the warblers and sparrows would follow her. Bees would drink the sweat from her skin and never once sting. My mother laughed and said the honey in our hives would taste especially wild and sweet.

Four-word Lines

Posted on by
2

Four-Word Lines
May Swenson

Your eyes are just
like bees, and I
feel like a flower.
Their brown power makes
a breeze go over
my skin. When your
lashes ride down and
rise like brown bees’
legs, your prolonged gaze
makes my eyes gauze.
I wish we were
in some shade and
no swarm of other
eyes to know that
I’m a flower breathing
bare, laid open to
your bees’ warm stare.
I’d let you wade
in me and seize
with your eager brown
bees’ power a sweet
glistening at my core.

from New and Selected Things Taking Place

Oh, mouth of honey

Posted on by
Reply

Cean Dubh Deelish
Sir Samuel Ferguson

Put your head, darling, darling, darling,
Your darling black head my heart above;
Oh, mouth of honey, with the thyme for fragrance,
Who, with heart in breast, could deny you love?

the bee is the fleur-de-lys in the flesh

Posted on by
Reply

from “The Fly”
Galway Kinnell

The bee is the fleur-de-lys in the flesh.
She has a tuft of the sun on her back.
She brings sexual love to the narcissus flower.
She sings of fulfillment only
and stings and dies, and
everything she ever touches
is opening, opening.