Fabulous and Fierce

(It's stanzas 6through the end that really get me.)

Nishmat, Marge Piercy

When the night slides under with the last dimming star
and the red sky lightens between the trees,
and the heron glides tipping heavy wings in the river,
when crows stir and cry out their harsh joy,
and swift creatures of the night run toward their burrows,
and the deer raises her head and sniffs the freshening air,
and the shadows grow more distinct and then shorten,

then we rise into the day still clean as new snow.
The cat washes its paw and greets the day with gratitude.
Leviathan salutes breaching with a column of steam.
The hawk turning in the sky cries out a prayer like a knife.
We must wonder at the sky now thin as a speckled eggshell,
that now piles up its boulders of storm to crash down,
that now hangs a furry grey belly into the street.

Every day we find a new sky and a new earth
with which we are trusted like a perfect toy.
We are given the salty river of our blood
winding through us, to remember the sea and our
kindred under the waves, the hot pulsing that knocks
in out throats to consider our cousins in the grass
and the trees, all bright scattered rivulets of life.

We are given the wind within us, the breath
to shape into words that steal time, that touch
like hands and pierce like bullets, that waken
truth and deceit, sorrow and pity and joy,
that waste precious air in complaints, in lies,
in floating traps for power on the dirty air.
Yet holy breath still stretches our lungs to sing.

We are given the body, that momentary kibbutz
of elements that have belongs to frog and polar
bear, corn and oak tree, volcano and glacier.
We are lent for a time these minerals in water
and a morning every day, a morning to wake up,
rejoice and praise life in our spines, in our throats,
our knees, our genitals, our brains, our tongues.

We are given fire to see against the dark,
to think, to read, to study how we are to live,
to bank in ourselves against defeat and despair
that cool and muddy our resolves, that make us forget
what we saw we must do. We are given passion
to rise like the sun in our minds with the new day
and burn the debris of habit and greed and fear.

We stand in the midst of the burning world
primed to burn with compassionate love and justice,
to turn inward and find holy fire at the core,
to turn outward and see the world that is all
of one flesh with us, see under the trash, through
the smog, the furry bee in the apple blossom,
the trout leaping, the candles our ancestors lit for us.

Fill us as the tide rustles into the reeds in the marsh.
Fill us as the rushing water overflows the pitcher.
Fill us as light fills a room with its dancing.
Let the little quarrels of the bones and the snarling
of the lesser appetites and the whining of the ego cease.
Let silence sill us so that you may show us your shining
and we can out of that stillness rise and praise.

I saw her dancing, Marge Piercy

I.

Because I saw her change
Because I saw her
change
Cuba in the simmering summer of sixty-eight
when the walls of the ghettoed world seemed to be metling
from the heat of our bodies and our blazing minds
into wax dripping down a wine bottle
and the sun itself was the bright candle.

Santos, santaría
Dram speaking to drum
each a heart pounding each a womb throbbing
hands caressing, teasing, spanking, kneading the stretched
skin.

An old woman was dancing to the drums, in faded cotton
skirts
scrawny chicken neck, loose shuddering arms
washerwoman toeing and swirling to the rhythms
when Yemanja came to ride her.

My knees jellied. My eyes burned of smoke.
Then I was turning in place, a top
whirled by a strong,
for her face sparkled like a waterfall in sunlight
for her skin was smooth as still water
that plays mirror to the moon's leaning face
for her arms were lithe and snapping snakes
fpr she swayed tall as a coconut palm
her hips rolled to the waves calling them home
and teasing them out again
and she changed
and she changed
and she changed
and seeing I was shaken like water troubled to the bottom
stones the water punishes and polishes bright.

Then it was again an old woman
flabby and limp and washed out like old cotton shirts
pounded on the rocks and bleached in the sun
too many times and hard years.

2.
Because all poets know how the god
seizes you by the nape and shakes till your bones
vibrate all their tuning forks on key
taking you from behind like a great tomcat
mounting you with teeth gripped in your skin
pulling tight, tight as a drum.

Because all artists know the self
is a bag of roaring winds northeast, south, west
coiling for a curious fool to loose them,
and all artists are fools who push on and in
servants of chaos and of order in each season
as Persephone labored to please death and fertility
finding in herself both seed and skull
the flower that opens at each end of life.

Because all women know being used
by what wants to come into the world, by what scatches
and claws and gouges its way toward light,
and then starts screaming its lungs sore,
needing infinite labor just to keep in the air.

3.
I a Jew saw Yemanja and worshiped
as I have met other goddesses
in dark and shining places.

It is all many as fingers and toes and the hair of your head
and it is all one.
It is all one as an egg, as a seed, as a stone, as a fire
and it is all many.

I know I know I know I am known
in silence liquid and dark as oil
still locked in rock, in the hot peristaltic bowels of the earth.

Yanking my hair hard till my eyes tear,
she touches the nape there
breathing out her fiery dragon's breath
and I am changed.

We are lit up and then the light fades out.
I stand in the field pelted with the rain
and wait for the forked gift to electrify me.

Nothing living moves in straight lines
but in arcs, in epicycles, in spirals, in gyres.
Nothing living grows in cubes or cones or rhomboids
but we take a little here and give a little here
and we change
and the wind blows right through us and knocks the apples
from the tree and hangs a red kite suddenly there
and a fox comes to bite the apples curiously
and we change
or die
and then change.
Is is many as drop
is it one as rain
and we are in it, in it, of it.
We eat and it eats us
and fullness is never and now.



[santaría=sic]