Dr. Margaret Saine, USA

FEMALE BIRDS DO SING 

Hmmm...

female birds

what is it about them

we thought they couldn’t sing

Darwin said so

only males sang

male song was only

to attract females

And we women poets

covered our heads in shame

feeling like usurpers and

wondering about strange Sappho

and other female delinquents

while male poets

inventing stories about us

painted us into a corner

their corner

as muses silently coaxing out

their male poems

about ourselves

It is nice

to serve as a midwife

for male writing

--any poem really is

an improvement of human life—

but we women wanted

to have our own voice

And then they told us

that female birds don’t sing

But now we know better

Female birds sing birdsong

just as males do

Hello male poets!

Here we come!

Women poets! 

THREADS

            A gentle heart is tied with an easy thread.

                                                             George Herbert

She holds in her fingers

a thread and wraps it around her index

unwraps it into an untidy skein

a warp to rewrap it again

Her right fingers stroke

the fingers of her left hand

the opposite of Buddha’s

a wind ruffling the fronds of palms

playfully subsiding and starting up again

when warm and cold air clash

to play their life game as wind

Women having to do with threads

Ariadne Penelope and many others

as we today

Sappho Cassandra and Pythia

hold their word threads

in the foretold sequence:

the burden of words in a necklace of beads

a rosary none other than pain and sorrow

told to male poets

Plump vowels dissected

by sputtering consonants

speech bubbles erupting like pearls

emerge from a deep-conch sea

crunched to expel them

To make us gasp

and grasp the meaning

of stories as spacers

pacemakers of life

--read peacemakers--

there for us to accept with a smile

the stoking of fire but containing it

And in the news today

‘Unidentified amnesiac woman

found today in California’

DIFFERENT BLOOD

What men feed

with their blood

is a war to be torn

What women feed

with their blood is

a child to be born

Male war blood

is supposedly

heroic

What about

the menstrual kind?

the placenta?

Women need to

remind the world

again and again

Remind each man

of his birth

again and again

WOMAN OF WOMAN BORN

                   La femme n’a d’amis que ses songes.

                   A woman’s only friends are her dreams.

                                                             -Jules Michelet

We were not thought of

we were despised

disposed-of and

pushed into corners

mental and otherwise

No bonus of being

a woman of woman born

quite otherwise

We forged then were forced

to forget the womb

all the dreams we had

We were not given the facts

we were given stories

older than Methusalah can remember

of Snow White, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty

tied, tried and true

to extricate from them

what women were

might be, or become

We were allowed to puzzle out

our often-dire fate

with Pythia Cassandra and Ariadne

Like ignorant poets

and lazy kings

we [being neither lazy nor ignorant]

were forced to invent

our lives out of

not whole and not new cloth

but from a stale barnstorm of spiderwebs

snowed-in like dandelion fluff

[dandruff fluff]

snowed out of our lives

in difficulty of our self-birth

our becoming

And we made it

we are making it

Dr. Margaret Saine was born in Germany and lives in California. She has taught French and Hispanic literatures and writes in five languages, also translating other poets between these languages. Her books of poetry in English are “Bodyscapes,” “Words of Art,” “Lit Angels,” and “Gardens of the Earth.” Saine has also published four poetry books and a childhood memoir in Germany. She has written over 4000 haiku and has several manuscripts in Italian, French and Spanish ready for publication.

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Women, Power & Creativity :: Setu, March 2019