Marge Piercy

from Marge Piercy (2)

Novelist. Poet. Memoirist

We have hoped for rain too long

Finally the sky greyed and lowered

like a quilt drooping onto the trees

opening its seams and gently

releasing feathers slowly falling.

Rain caresses the roof, makes

tiny stars of water on the windows.

The little tomato plants stand

to greet it. The soil eats it up.

The air had been heavy with pollen

and dust. Seedlings leaned over,

withered and died. The woods

were crisp. The ground crunched.

How gorgeous are puddles. Birds

dunk in them. Leaves uncoil as we

watch. The world has taken a bath

and emerges clean and freshened.

Amein to the rain that blesses us.

Tomorrow we’ll forgive, praise the sun.

Goose loves turtle

I watch a program about unlikely

friends, bear with tiger, cat

with crow, donkey with pig, dog

with faun. Strange as the bond

between me and rescued cat

who in night’s murky middle

suddenly crawls on my belly

to check I’m here, alive. Purrs.

Maybe all loves are incongruous.

Why choose an animal, a person

to adore? Some just don’t.

Never to have loved seems

strange to me, but pledging

oneself to some other closed

too in skin and bone is ignorant

choice, a grab bag, a cliff.

Love is blind, we say, but

how would seeing help? Off

we go into next year and loss

we can’t guess. Alley oop!

Marge Piercy is the author of seventeen novels including The New York Times Bestseller Gone To Soldiers; the National Bestsellers Braided Lives and The Longings of Women and the classic Woman on the Edge of Time; eighteen volumes of poetry, and a critically acclaimed memoir Sleeping with Cats. Born in center city Detroit, educated at the University of Michigan, the recipient of four honorary doctorates, she has been a key player in many of the major progressive political battles of our time. Her first collection of short stories The Cost of Lunch, Etc. was published in Summer, 2014, and her nineteenth volume of poetry, Made in Detroit, published from Knopf in April, 2015.

A popular speaker on college campuses, she has been a featured writer on Bill Moyers’ PBS Specials, Prairie Home Companion, Fresh Air, the Today Show, and many radio programs nationwide including Air America and Oprah & Friends. Her poems are read frequently on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac.

Praised as one of the few American writers who are accomplished poets as well as novelists — Piercy is one of our country’s best selling poets — she is also the master of many genres: historical novels, science fiction (He, She, and It won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction in the United Kingdom), novels of social comment and contemporary entertainments. She has taught, lectured and/or performed her work at well over 400 universities around the world.

“Marge Piercy is not just an author, she’s a cultural touchstone. Few writers in modern memory have sustained her passion, and skill, for creating stories of consequence.”

-The Boston Globe