Quotes by Women Poets

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.

Why are you not where you belong? / A black hat on a hook says nothing. / Ashes mirror ashes / In a mirroring window.

Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light;
I have loved the stars too truly to be fearful of the night.

Wasn't no "death do us part" in slavery; wasn't even no "dead or sold" less'n two peoples made it that. Far as two peoples loving with each other, it was any handy place if you was willing —and sometimes if you wasn't; or you jumped the broom if the masters let you marry. But you couldn't help dreaming. Dreams was one of the reasons you got up the next day.

Sherley Anne Williams

So some unlucky Engineer Does all the fit Materials compound, That are in Art or Nature found; Will glorious Fire-Works prepare.

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

Poetry, I'm returning to it, never leaves me. It's my genre completely. In poetry I contemplate myself exuberantly. It's my unique strength. Force of gravity, electric and magnetic energy; in my own way, to make a synthesis.

Nicole Brossard

Poor indeed must thou be, if around thee
Thou no ray of light and joy canst throw—

Harriet Winslow Sewall

The length of a meeting rises with the square of the number of people present.

Eileen Shanahan

Where did feelings go when they disappeared? Did they leave a chemical trace somewhere in our minds, so that if we could look inside ourselves we would see via the patterns of neurons some of the important things that had happened to us in our lifetimes?

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

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.

Wonder is music heard in the heart, is voiceless...

Rosemary Dobson

Restless, incautious, I want to talk violence,
Speak wild poems, hush, be still, pray grace
Taken forever; and after, lie long in the dense
Dark of your embrace, asleep between earth and space.

It was only my second night in Africa, yet something had begun to grow inside me which I could not stop, as if my childhood dreams had finally found the place where they could materialize. I had arrived where I was always meant to be. I did not know how it could be practically achieved, but I was certain beyond any shadow of a doubt that it was here that I wanted to live.

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.