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

You can't drive to the coastline. You can only drive so close to the white chalky cliff and then you have to get out and dive.

Joyelle McSweeney

The spirit of the year, like bacchant crowned, With lighted torch goes careless on his way; And soon bursts into flame the maple's spray, And vines are running fire along the ground.

Edith M. Thomas

Go sow your wild oats
And reap as you will;
I hoe in one furrow
And heap all my fill.

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

Alone! Alone! No beacon, far or near! No chart, no compass, and no anchor stay!

Various random experiments, cut-ups, fold-ins, juxtapositions, timed writings of other kinds, the "objects assignment" which involves dream, adventure, ancestry. Writing outside, writing on moving vehicles. Looking at paintings in the grand museums of the world in a proscribed way.Little strategies to keep the lalita - play or dance - going. Sometimes it's lonely you know, just you and your own imagination.

I believe if I should die,
And you should kiss my eyelids where I lie
Cold, dead, and dumb to all the world contains,
The folded orbs would open at thy breath,
And from its exile in the Isles of Death
Life would come gladly back along my veins.

Mary Ashley Townsend

The sea raises you to your feet. And dead calm.
Strands of light hold your hand. Now you have left
this shore. Now you are in the wind of an invisible sail.

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.

Why did I buy it? What was I thinking? It's all wrong. Tacky, but not in a good way. It looks suburban. It spells housewife. Too nurturing. I don't even have kids. No one will take me seriously. It must have been the lighting. I was in a hurry. I don't even want to return it. Just get it out of here. Throw it away.

They have our bundles split open in museums / our dresses & shirts at auctions / our languages on tape / our stories in locked rare book libraries / our dances on film / The only part of us they can't steal / is what we know.

The economy of gift, of art, is fundamentally opposed to the economy of war.

Mary Rose O'Reilley

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

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, Last night,
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?

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.