CELEBRATION OF THE BODY

I love this body of mine that has lived a life,
its amphora contour soft as water,
my hair gushing out of my skull,
my face a glass goblet on its delicate stem
rising with grace from shoulders and collarbones.

I love my back studded with ancient stars,
the bright mounds of my breasts,
fountains of milk, our species’ first food,
my protruding ribcage, my yielding waist,
my belly’s fullness and warmth.

I love the lunar curve of my hips
shaped by various gestations,
the great curling wave of my buttocks,
my legs and feet, on which the temple stands.

I love my bunch of dark petals and secret fur
keeper of heaven’s mysterious gate,
to the damp hollow from which blood flows
and the water of life.

The body of mine that can hurt and get ill,
that oozes, coughs, sweats,
secretes humors, faces, saliva,
grows tired, old and worn out.

Living body, one solid link to secure
the unending chain of bodies.
I love this body made of pure earth,
seed, root, sap, flower and fruit.

TRANSLANTED BY DINAH LIVINGSTON

A strong woman is a woman who craves love like oxygen,
or she turns blue choking. A strong woman is a woman
who loves strongly and weeps strongly and is strongly terrified
and has strong needs. A strong woman is strong in words, in action,
in connection, in feeling – she is not strong as stone, but as a wolf
suckling her young. Strength is not in her, but she enacts it
as the wind fills a sail. What comforts her is others loving her
equally for the strength and for the weakness, from which it issues
lightning from a cloud. Lightning stuns. In rain, the clouds disperse.
Only water of connections remains, flowing through us.
Strong is what we make each other. Until we are all strong together,
a strong woman is a woman strongly afraid.

Marge Piercy

“She talked to us about the fact that women were like a separate race, gifted with knowledge of all aspects of relationship, and that our task was to model, to share, and teach this to men.”

Buffalo Woman Comes Singing, Brooke Medicine Eagle, pp. 226