Quotes by Women Poets

You know, they say that there is a part
of the human chest that it you strike it hard enough,
it makes the person's heart explode. This sounds like
such a lie that I have to believe it's the truth. If I were
science, I'd never tell anyone where this place is.
If I were science, I'd have named this place after you.

Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz

When and where will another come to take your holy place?
Old man mumbling in his dotage, or crying child, unborn?

Margaret Walker

My son called to me that God was inside his red fire engine. He wanted to show me. I did move as fast as I could, spilling like water through the kitchen door into a summer day, but God had left by the time I got there. My son smiled, told me I'd missed him by seconds.

To play pianissimo
is to carry sweet words
to the old woman in the last dark row
who cannot hear anything else,
and to lay them across her lap like a shawl.

Like a page dipped in ink, your cuff's in my coffee. / You have something to tell with unbuttoned sleeves.

What is it our mammas bewitches
To plague us little boys with breeches?

Abstract art: a construction site for high fashion, for advertising, for furniture.

Adrienne Monnier

the Revolution aint dead
its tired,
and jest resting.

Carolyn Rodgers

These be
Three silent things:
The falling snow... the hour
Before the dawn... the mouth of one
Just dead.

Adelaide Crapsey

The goddess has never been lost. It is just that some of us have forgotten how to find her.

Patricia Monaghan

My grandfather was the great solace. He didn't have a lot of formal education, but he had a feeling for words and a sense of the past, a sense of being involved in something larger than his own immediate concerns.

Unnoticed, the passage has occurred; as I brood, autumn dusk dewdrops fall on my pillow. The voices of insects and the deer by the fence, as one, disturb me to tears this autumn dusk.

Princess Shikishi

Even the simplest poem
May destroy your immunity to human emotions.
All poems must carry a Government warning. Words
Can seriously affect your heart.

If you want to love
Do so
To the ends of the earth
With no shortcuts
Do so
As the crow flies.

Véronique Tadjo

Expression, child of soul! I fondly trace
Thy strong enchantment, when the poet's lyre,
The painter's pencil cathch thy sacred fire,
And beauty wakes for thee her touching grace

Helen Maria Williams

I saw the radiant Queen of Night
Walking in brightness through the sky...

Charlotte Elliott

It is still news to her that passion could steer her wrong though she went down, a thousand times strung out across railroad tracks, off bridges under cars, or stiff glass bottle still in hand, hair soft on greasy pillows, still it is news she cannot follow love (his burning footsteps in blue crystal snow) & still come out all right.

Grief, I have cursed thee often — now at last
To hate thy name I am no longer free;
Caught in thy bony arms and prisoned fast,
I love no love but thee.

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge

University students are rarely able to cope with universals and death is the most embarrassing universal.

Kate Cruise O'Brien

There is no great; there is no small; in the mind that causeth all

Dusk over the lake,
clouds floating
heat lightning
a nightmare behind branches

Apertures, passages from one world to another. Man's escape hatches.

This is the divine moment when we can hold the fairest blossom of spring in one hand and the sweetest flowers of early summer in the other.

Patience Strong

I am called "Venus Hottentot."
I left Capetown with a promise
of revenue: half the profits
and my passage home: A boon!
Master's brother proposed the trip;
the magistrate granted me leave
I would return to my family
a duchess, with watered-silk
dresses and money to grow food.

Elizabeth Alexander (poet)

Woman, a pleasing but a short-lived flower,
Too soft for business and too weak for power:
A wife in bondage, or neglected maid:
Despised, if ugly; if she's fair, betrayed.