Quotes by Women Poets

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.

She breathed the husky whisper—
"Curfew must not ring tonight."

And if my heart isn't in my mouth it's because it knows its place.

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.

As a first-generation "Asian American woman," for one thing, I knew there was no such thing as an "Asian American woman." Within this homogenizing labeling of an exotica, I knew there were entire racial/national/cultural/sexual-preferenced groups, many of whom find each other as alien as mainstream America apparently finds me.

I love the sweet linnet, the lark, and the thrush, And the gold-throated blackbird with a song in each bush ; The finch and the robin, I love everyone, But not the pied magpie that's walking alone.

Uniformity, in its motives, its goals, its far-ranging consequences, is the natural enemy of poetry, not to mention the enemy of trees, the soil, the exemplary life therein.

Carolyn D. Wright
Carolyn D. Wright
Death stops the body's work, the soul's a journeyman.

Natasha Trethewey
Natasha Trethewey
its music comes out the radio
drives beside me in my car. strolls along with me
down supermarket aisles
it's on television
and in the streets even when my walk is casual/undefined
it's overhead flashing lights
i find it in my mouth
when i would speak of other things.

Inverted heart,
becomes the testicles
of a man.

Sheri-D Wilson
Sheri-D Wilson
Imagination is the bridge between
the things we know for sure
and the things we need to believe
When our world becomes unbearable.

Staceyann Chin
Staceyann Chin
You can't have two worlds in your hands
and choose emptiness.

How happily, how happily, the flowers die away!
Oh! Could we but return to earth as easily as they.

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

Rosemary Dobson
Rosemary Dobson
It is hard work to give life to new characters every single day. It is not as if I am God. I am just a tired, middle-aged woman trying to keep going.

Karin Fossum
Karin Fossum
I do not feel myself called upon to say how many loaves of bread, under my apprenticeship, came out of the oven as heavy as a bad joke...

I know that there is not in the world a more subtle poison than that which is extracted from and administered by books.

Charlotte Dacre
Charlotte Dacre
My mother raises rare blooms
and waters them with tea
her birth waters sang like rivers
my mother is now me.

Forever seeking, never found,
In this wide varied scene;
Sole object of unceasing search,
While in this low terrene.
Yet vain the search, if in the heart
Some lurking passion dwell;
For this will hang with cypress wreath
Retirement's secret cell.
In vain the outward scene is calm,
In vain the world we fly;
If thou, in pure religion's garb,
Thy friendly aid deny.

War rages on the teeming earth;
The hot and sanguinary fight
Begins with each new creature's birth:
A dreadful war where might is right;
Where still the strongest slay and win,
Where weakness is the only sin.

Mathilde Blind
Mathilde Blind
There is only one proper way to wear a beautiful dress: to forget you are wearing it.

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?

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

All quiet along the Potomac, they say,
Except now and then a stray picket
Is shot as he walks on his beat to and fro,
By a rifleman hid in the thicket.
'Tis nothing—a private or two now and then
Will not count in the news of the battle;
Not an officer lost—only one of the men,
Moaning out, all alone, the death-rattle.
The music was by James Hewitt

If this be all, for which I've listened long,
Oh, spirit of the dew!
You did not sing to Shelley such a song
As Shelley sung to you.