Flowers For Socrates

by NONA BLYTH CLOUD

March is Women’s History Month, so I’ll be talking about women poets this month. Ask two hundred people on the main streets across America to name American women poets — if they came up with anyone, almost certainly it would be Emily Dickinson, and most would stop there, though perhaps a few might know Maya Angelou’s name. Emily Dickinson is certainly one of the Great Names in English-language poetry from any country, but so many other wonderful women poets languish little known or long forgotten.

So, in this month’s blog “I’d like you to meet . . .” poets you may or may not know. Women in all branches of the Arts are still playing catch-up with their male counterparts, since opportunities for women outside the narrow world of “Kinder, Küche, und Kirche” (kids, kitchen, and kirk, which is another word for church) were rare before the mid-19th century.

This week’s subject is Marge Piercy (1936 — ), who was born in Detroit, Michigan, on March 31st. Her working-class parents were Jewish, living in a predominately black neighborhood, where the Great Depression hit hard. She became the first in her family to go to college, on a scholarship to the University of Michigan, where she joined and became an organizer for political movements like the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and Anti-Vietnam War/Pro-Peace groups. She’s a feminist, a Marxist and an environmentalist. Piercy is also a prolific writer, with almost 20 novels and 20 books of poetry published. She’s written plays, several volumes of nonfiction, a memoir, and edited the anthology Early Ripening: American Women’s Poetry Now. Piercy also explores Jewish issues, and was poetry editor of Tikkun Magazine.
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The Air Smelled Dirty

Everyone burned coal in our neighborhood,
soft coal they called it from the mountains
of western Pennsylvania where my father
grew up and fled as soon as he could, where
my Welsh cousins dug it down in the dark.

The furnace it fed stood in the dank
basement, its many arms upraised
like Godzilla or some other monster.
It was my job to pull out clinkers
and carry them to the alley bin.

Mornings were chilly, frost on windows
etching magic landscapes.  I liked
to stand over the hot air registers
the warmth blowing up my skirts.
But the basement scared me at night.

The fire glowed like a red eye through
the furnace door and the clinkers fell
loud and the shadows came at me as
mice scampered.  The washing machine
was tame but the furnace was always hungry.

“The Air Smelled Dirty” from Third Wednesday, (Vol. X, No. 1, 2017), © 2017 by Marge Piercy
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