Female Poets

Bergerette

Marguerite de Navarre
French
1492 – 1549

 

O shepherdess, my friend,
On love alone I live.
True love is life’s true end,
My heart can comprehend,
And therefore I intend
My love unceasingly to give.
O shepherdess, my friend,
On love alone I live.

Love lends me confidence,
Grants conscience calmer sense,
Builds patient competence,
Forms faith and hope restorative;
O shepherdess, my friend,
On love alone I live.

Love is my victory,
Honor, gleaming glory;
Fashions me his story
Of pleasure’s daily narrative.
O shepherdess, my friend,
On love alone I live.

Love has such lovely grace
That when I see his face
I find a tranquil place
For fervent years contemplative.
O shepherdess, my friend,
On love alone I live.

Love offers deep content:
With his care provident
And arm omnipotent,
I need no aid alternative.
O shepherdess, my friend,
On love alone I live.

Love draws me lovingly,
Attracts with gloom, then glee,
Charms me with misery.
Alas! His changes I misgive.
O shepherdess, my friend,
On love alone I live.

Love spreads his wings to fly,
Calls me to gratify
Him by pursuit; I sigh,
And hurry toward the fugitive.
O shepherdess, my friend,
On love alone I live.

Love, to secure my heart,
Falls in my arms by art,
And then away will dart
In dalliance provocative.
O shepherdess, my friend,
On love alone I live.

My joy without a peer
Inspires such songful cheer,
I cry to every ear,
“Love love, or lapse insensitive!”
O shepherdess, my friend,
On love alone I live.

Shepherdesses gracious,
For Love be amorous,
Thereby more rapturous
Than queens of high prerogative.
O shepherdess, my friend,
On love alone I live.

Translation by Margaret Coats

After the death of the Emperor Tenmu

We present this work in honor of the 1,320th anniversary of the poet’s death.

Empress Jitō
Japanese
645 – 703

 

Oh, the autumn foliage
Of the hill of Kamioka!
My good Lord and Sovereign
Would see it in the evening
And ask of it in the morning.
On that very hill from afar
I gaze, wondering
If he sees it today,
Or asks of it tomorrow.
Sadness I feel at eve,
And heart-rending grief at morn –
The sleeves of my coarse-cloth robe
Are never for a moment dry.

Out of Context

We present this work in honor of the Moroccan holiday, Proclamation of Independence.

Touria Majdouline
Moroccan
b. 1960

 

I gather my confusion and my things
My steps
And the remaining illusions
Of my body
I run beyond time
Beyond the vacant air
And space

Yesterday I drew my open space here
And dreamed a lot
I sowed shade, and fruit, and crops around
And with flames I wrote my poems…
Yesterday
I had plenty of time
To embroider space with words.
But today
I am left with nothing
But my dejection
And the crumbs of yesterdays gone by

Thus I gather my things
I wrap myself up in my own confusion
And I run
I run beyond time
I propagate into the distance
With neither shade
Nor sun.

Translation by Abdellah Benlamine and Norddine Zouitni

Sorrowing Love

We present this work in honor of the 100th anniversary of the poet’s death.

Katherine Mansfield
Kiwi
1888 – 1923

 

And again the flowers are come,
And the light shakes,
And no tiny voice is dumb,
And a bud breaks
On the humble bush and the proud restless tree.
Come with me!

Look, this little flower is pink,
And this one white.
Here’s a pearl cup for your drink,
Here’s for your delight
A yellow one, sweet with honey.
Here’s fairy money
Silver bright
Scattered over the grass
As we pass.

Here’s moss. How the smell of it lingers
On my cold fingers!
You shall have no moss. Here’s a frail
Hyacinth, deathly pale.
Not for you, not for you!
And the place where they grew
You must promise me not to discover,
My sorrowful lover!
Shall we never be happy again?
Never again play?
In vain—in vain!
Come away!

Morning Necktie

We present this work in honor of the poet’s 60th birthday.

Machi Tawara
Japanese
b. 1962

 

Set off to see for myself
my father’s name
carved in a Tohoku museum

Once the “world’s strongest,”
my father’s magnet
crouches on a shelf

Monday morning
the head of the Magnetic Research Institute
picks out his necktie

My father, perfectly at home
with rare earth elements,
loves Modigliani women

“Writing more love poems?”
half humorously
half anxiously

His present—
Sanuki noodles—
comes stuffed in a company envelope

Something warm in the way
he calls his wife “Mother”
without the least hesitation

He wipes his face with a hot towel
and sighs contentedly—
looking at him now I see an ordinary man

Moving away from the telephone
he sips his tea as if to say
“I’m not listening”

Forgiven
their inability to express tenderness—
men of my father’s generation

Translation by Juliet Winters Carpenter

A Folk Song

Jessie Mackay
Kiwi
1864 – 1938

 

I came to your town, my love,
And you were away, away!
I said “She is with the Queen’s maidens:
They tarry long at their play.
They are stringing her words like pearls
To throw to the dukes and earls.”
But O, the pity!
I had but a morn of windy red
To come to the town where you were bred,
And you were away, away!

I came to your town, my love,
And you were away, away!
I said, “She is with the mountain elves
And misty and fair as they.
They are spinning a diamond net
To cover her curls of jet.”
But O, the pity!
I had but a noon of searing heat
To come to your town, my love, my sweet,
And you were away, away!

I came to your town, my love,
And you were away, away!
I said, “She is with the pale white saints,
And they tarry long to pray.
They give her a white lily-crown,
And I fear she will never come down.”
But O, the pity!
I had but an even grey and wan
To come to your town and plead as man,
And you were away, away!

In the Mid-Midwinter

We present this work in honor of the poet’s 75th birthday.

Liz Lochhead
Scots
b. 1947

 

after John Donne’s ‘A Nocturnal on St Lucy’s Day’

At midday on the year’s midnight
into my mind came
I saw the new moon late yestreen
wi the auld moon in her airms
though, no,
there is no moon of course –
there’s nothing very much of anything to speak of
in the sky except a gey dreich greyness
rain-laden over Glasgow and today
there is the very least of even this for us to get
but
the light comes back
the light always comes back
and this begins tomorrow with
however many minutes more of sun and serotonin.

Meanwhile
there will be the winter moon for us to love the longest,
fat in the frosty sky among the sharpest stars,
and lines of old songs we can’t remember
why we know
or when first we heard them
will aye come back
once in a blue moon to us
unbidden

and bless us with their long-travelled light.

Uneasy Sleep

Yvette Christiansë
South African
b. 1954

 

Who was it that cried out? This cry,
a call that opens night
breaks out like a bird
breaking to greet dawn, or
the arrival of a high tide
that brings schools of fish
whose scales make the waters
glint and shimmer, glint and shimmer.

Who cried? Who woke us
to such things on such a dark night?
Do not ask. No, do not ask.
The moon will make a basin
for tears and where your heart beats
a well will dry up and the weight
of ships leaning against the wind
will make you think of a woman
hanging in the hammock
of an early death.

Daydream

We present this work in honor of the 45th anniversary of the poet’s death.

Saïda Menebhi
Moroccan
1952 – 1977

 

You know my child
I wrote a poem for you
but don’t chastise me
for writing it is this language
that you don’t yet understand
it’s nothing my child
when you are older
you will seize this dream
that I dreamt in the middle of the day
when it’s your turn, you will tell the story of this woman
Arab prisoner
in her own country
Arab up to her white hair
her greenish eyes
the dream my child
begins
when I see a pigeon
the birds that build their nests
on the roofs of prisons
I dream of sending a message to the revolutionaries
of Palestine
in order to assure them support for victory
I dream of having wings
just like sparrows
to traverse the skies
as far as Erythrea
as far as Dhofar
arms heavy with guns
the head with poems
I want to be a passenger
on board clouds
with my war attire
combating Pinochet
in the back country of Chili
so that my blood runs
on Chilean soil
that Neruda praised
o my dream
red Africa
without hungry children
I dream
that the moon
up there is going to fall
to take out the enemy
and that the moon will leave me
in Palestine or in the Sahara
anywhere
I struggle for victory
For all people who are combatants.