Women Poems
Green Chile
by Jimmy Santiago Baca
I prefer red chile over my eggs
and potatoes for breakfast.
Red chile ristras decorate my door,
dry on my roof, and hang from eaves.
They lend open-air vegetable stands
historical grandeur, and gently swing
with an air of festive welcome.
I can hear them talking in the wind,
haggard, yellowing, crisp, rasping
tongues of old men, licking the breeze.
......
Litany
by Billy Collins
You are the bread and the knife,
The crystal goblet and the wine...
-Jacques Crickillon
You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker,
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.
......
Palme
by Paul Valéry
Veiling, barely, his dread
Beauty and its blaze,
An angel sets warm bread
and cool milk at my place.
His eyelids make the sign
Of prayer; I lower mine,
Words interleaving vision:
--Calm, calm, be ever calm!
Feel the whole weight a palm
Bears upright in profusion.
......
Sonnet 20: A Woman's Face With Nature's Own Hand Painted
by William Shakespeare
A woman's face with Nature's own hand painted
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;
A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women's fashion;
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hue, all hues in his controlling,
Which steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou first created,
Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,
......
Barbie Doll
by Marge Piercy
This girlchild was born as usual
and presented dolls that did pee-pee
and miniature GE stoves and irons
and wee lipsticks the color of cherry candy.
Then in the magic of puberty, a classmate said:
You have a great big nose and fat legs.
She was healthy, tested intelligent,
possessed strong arms and back,
abundant sexual drive and manual dexterity.
......
Across the Same Dawn
by Oscar Auliq-Ice
Before the sun learns every name for light,
she is already counting what the day might cost—
a breath held quietly at a kitchen sink,
a train she misses so someone else can go,
a voice rehearsed, then softened at the edges
so it will not break the room.
Somewhere, a girl learns the shape of silence
before she learns the shape of her own name.
Somewhere else, a woman stitches time together
......
The Quiet Geography of Her Name
by Oscar Auliq-Ice
She is born where the maps forget to linger,
where borders are drawn through kitchen floors
and the weather report includes uncertainty
about whether she will be allowed to leave.
Her childhood is a thin ledger of permissions—
who she may speak to,
how loudly she may laugh,
what she must become to be considered safe.
......
Between the Lines of Her Day
by Oscar Auliq-Ice
She wakes where the world begins asking too much—
before the kettle speaks, before the sky agrees to brighten.
There are lists already waiting in her mind:
what must be done,
what must be endured,
what must be softened so others can remain comfortable.
In cities of glass and villages of dust,
her name is spoken in different weights—
sometimes as hope, sometimes as warning,
......
No Room Left in the Margin
by Oscar Auliq-Ice
Before the first appointment is missed, the day is already overbooked.
Care is divided into fractions:
childhoods guided, elders supported, households held together
with the invisible tape of repetition and responsibility.
Across continents, the pattern changes shape but not weight—
a bus seat given up, a job interview scheduled around necessity,
a dream postponed into a language called “later,”
which often means “never for now.”
......
A Ledger of Unfinished Things
by Oscar Auliq-Ice
The world keeps a record, though not always fairly—
some entries bold, some erased by habit,
some written in ink that fades under the heat of being overlooked.
There are women who translate exhaustion into routine,
who turn absence into strategy,
who learn to measure time not in hours
but in what can be survived between them.
A morning begins with negotiation:
......
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William Butler Yeats (81 poems about Women)
W.B. Yeats] (13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939 / County Dublin / Ireland -
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