homage to my hips
BY LUCILLE CLIFTON
these hips are big hips
they need space to
move around in.
they don't fit into little
petty places. these hips
are free hips.
they don't like to be held back.
these hips have never been enslaved,
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips.
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top!
I Have Become Very Hairy
I have become very hairy all over my body.
I'm afraid they'll start hunting me because of my fur.
My multicolored shirt has no meaning of love -it looks like an air photo of a railway station.
At night my body is open and awake under the blanket,
like eyes under the blindfold of someone to be shot.
Restless I shall wander about;
hungry for life I'll die.
Yet I wanted to be calm, like a mound with all its cities destroyed,
and tranquil, like a full cemetery.
Yehuda Amichai
Epidermal Macabre
Indelicate is he who loathes
The aspect of his fleshy clothes, -The flying fabric stitched on bone,
The vesture of the skeleton,
The garment neither fur nor hair,
The cloak of evil and despair,
The veil long violated by
Caresses of the hand and eye.
Yet such is my unseemliness:
I hate my epidermal dress,
The savage blood's obscenity,
The rags of my anatomy,
And willingly would I dispense
With false accouterments of sense,
To sleep immodestly, a most
Incarnadine and carnal ghost.
Theodore Roethke
Cancer Winter (excerpts) – poem
1. Marilyn Hacker
I woke up, and the surgeon said, ‘You’re cured.’ Strapped to the gurney, in the cotton
gown and pants I was wearing when they slid me down onto the table, made news
straps secure while I stared at the hydra-headed O.R. lamp, I took in the tall,
confident, brown-skinned man, and the ache I couldn’t quite call pain from where
my right breast wasn’t anymore to my armpit. A not-yet-talking head, I bit dry my
lips. What else could he have said? And then my love was there in a hospital coat;
then my old love, still young and very scared. Then I, alone, graphed clock hands’
asymptote to noon, when I would be wheeled back upstairs. (...)
The hand that held the cup next was my daughter’s – who would be holding shirts
for me to wear, sleeve out, for my bum arm. She’d wash my hair (not falling yet),
strew teenager’s disorder in the kitchen, help me out of the bathwater. A dozen
times, she looked at the long scar studded with staples, where I’d suckled her, and
didn’t turn. She took me / I brought her to the surgeon’s office, where she’d hold
my hand, while his sure hand, with its neat tool, snipped the steel, as on a revised
manuscript radically rewritten since my star turn nursing her without a ‘nursing bra’
from small, firm breasts, a twenty-five-year-old’s.
Excerpted from WINTER NUMBERS: Poems by Marilyn Hacker
The Surgeon at 2 A.M.
The white light is artificial, and hygienic as heaven.
The microbes cannot survive it.
They are departing in their transparent garments, turned aside
From the scalpels and the rubber hands.
The scalded sheet is a snowfield, frozen and peaceful.
The body under it is in my hands.
As usual there is no face. A lump of Chinese white
With seven holes thumbed in. The soul is another light.
I have not seen it; it does not fly up.
Tonight it has receded like a ship's light.
It is a garden I have to do with --- tubers and fruit
Oozing their jammy substances,
A mat of roots. My assistants hook them back.
Stenches and colors assail me.
This is the lung-tree.
These orchids are splendid. They spot and coil like snakes.
The heart is a red bell-bloom, in distress.
I am so small
In comparison to these organs!
I worm and hack in a purple wilderness.
The blood is a sunset. I admire it.
I am up to my elbows in it, red and squeaking.
Still is seeps me up, it is not exhausted.
So magical! A hot spring
I must seal off and let fill
The intricate, blue piping under this pale marble.
How I admire the Romans --Aqeducts, the Baths of Caracella, the eagle nose!
The body is a Roman thing.
It has shut its mouth on the stone pill of repose.
It is a statue the orderlies are wheeling off.
I have perfected it.
I am left with and arm or a leg,
A set of teeth, or stones
To rattle in a bottle and take home,
And tissues in slices--a pathological salami.
Tonight the parts are entombed in an icebox.
Tomorrow they will swim
In vinegar like saints' relics.
Tomorrow the patient will have a clean, pink plastic limb.
Over one bed in the ward, a small blue light
Announces a new soul. The bed is blue.
Tonight, for this person, blue is a beautiful color.
The angels of morphia have borne him up.
He floats an inch from the ceiling,
Smelling the dawn drafts.
I walk among sleepers in gauze sarcophagi.
The red night lights are flat moons. They are dull with blood.
I am the sun, in my white coat,
Grey faces, shuttered by drugs, follow me like flowers.
Sylvia Plath
Insomnia
The moon in the bureau mirror
looks out a million miles
(and perhaps with pride, at herself,
but she never, never smiles)
far and away beyond sleep, or
perhaps she's a daytime sleeper.
By the Universe deserted,
she'd tell it to go to hell,
and she'd find a body of water,
or a mirror, on which to dwell.
So wrap up care in a cobweb
and drop it down the well
into that world inverted
where left is always right,
where the shadows are really the body,
where we stay awake all night,
where the heavens are shallow as the sea
is now deep, and you love me.
Elizabeth Bishop
If you’re interested in reading more poems about the body, consider the following:
“Phenomenal Woman” by Maya Angelou
“Poem to my Uterus” by Lucille Clifton
“Poem in Praise of Menstruation” by Lucille Clifton
“Hair” by Gregory Corso
“Atlantis” by Mark Doty
“After Reading Mickey In The Night Kitchen For The Third Time Before Bed”
by Rita Dove
“Footnote to Howl” by Allen Ginsberg
“A Story About the Body” by Robert Hass
“A Hand” by Jane Hirshfield
“Anodyne” by Yusef Komunyakaa
“My Mammogram” by J. D. McClatchy
“Small Hands, Relinquish All” by Edna St. Vincent Millay
“My Mother’s Body” by Marge Piercy
“The Applicant” by Sylvia Plath
“Face Lift” by Sylvia Plath
“Heavy Women” by Sylvia Plath
“Old Man Leaves Party” by Mark Strand
“Sketch for a Landscape” by May Swenson
"Question" by May Swenson
"I Sing the Body Electric" by Walt Whitman
"Dance Russe" by William Carlos Williams