Woman of Woman Born
La femme n’a d’amis que ses songes.
A woman’s only friends are her dreams.
Jules Michelet
We were not thought of
we were despised
disposed of and
pushed into corners
mental and otherwise
No bonus of being
a woman of woman born
quite otherwise
We forged then were forced
to forget the womb
all the dreams we had
We were not given the facts
we were given stories
older than Methusalah can remember
of Snow White, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty
tied, tried and true
to extricate from them
what women were
might be, or become
We were allowed to puzzle out
our often dire fate
with Pythia Cassandra and Ariadne
Like ignorant poets
and lazy kings
we [being neither lazy nor ignorant]
were forced to invent our lives out of
not whole and not new cloth
but from a stale barnstorm of spiderwebs
snowed-in like dandelion fluff
[dandruff fluff]
snowed out of our lives
in difficulty of our self-birth
our becoming
And we made it
we are in the making
© 2021 Margaret Saine
Female Birds do Sing
Hmmm...
female birds
what is it about them
we thought they couldn’t sing
Darwin said so
only males sang
male song was only
to attract females
And we women poets
covered our heads in shame
feeling like usurpers
while male poets
painted us into a corner
their corner
as muses
silently coaxing out
their male poems
It is nice
to serve as a midwife
for male poems
--any poem really is
an improvement of human life—
but we women wanted
to have our own voice
And then they told us
that female birds don’t sing
But now we know better
Female birds sing birdsong
just as males
Hello male poets!
Here we come!
Women poets!
© 2021 Margaret Saine
Margaret Saine was born in Germany and taught Hispanic literatures in California. She writes and translates in five languages. Books in English are Bodyscapes, Words of Art, Lit Angels, Gardens of the Earth, and A Book of Travel. Saine published four poetry books and a childhood memoir in Germany. In 2021 a book of Spanish poems will come out in Spain, French poems in Montreal. Two Italian books are to be published. Her poems have been translated into Arabic and other languages. She is an editor of The California Quarterly. Since 2008 she has written over 5 600 haiku.
I loved both the poems especially the second one.. luv
ReplyDeleteThank you, Margaret, for saying what needs to be said.
ReplyDelete