Louise Bogan wrote “Women” at the age of 24. Later in life she said at a reading (listen here) “my feelings concerning the sex have improved a great deal over the years.” There is a young bite to this that is not fair to all +3 billion women, but I like the admonition to all of us, a defiant sign driven deep into the ground by our younger selves. And in many ways we were right to do so.
WomenBy Louise Bogan
Women have no wilderness in them,
They are provident instead,
Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts
To eat dusty bread.
They do not see cattle cropping red winter grass,
They do not hear
Snow water going down under culverts
Shallow and clear.
They wait, when they should turn to journeys,
They stiffen, when they should bend.
They use against themselves that benevolence
To which no man is friend.
They cannot think of so many crops to a field
Or of clean wood cleft by an axe.
Their love is an eager meaninglessness
Too tense, or too lax.
They hear in every whisper that speaks to them
A shout and a cry.
As like as not, when they take life over their door-sills
They should let it go by.
1 comment
Interesting poem…gotta read it more times….thanks…these days all owned up by Frank O'Hara…here's the tiny bit that got me going…"Now I am quietly waiting for/the catastrophe of my personality/to seem beautiful again,and interesting, and modern"….but he was older than Louise when he wrote that for sure.