Our First Language

Marge Piercy lives on Cape Cod, Massachusetts with her novelist husband. She is an unusually prolific writer, with seventeen published novels and eighteen published collections of poetry. Her poetry is often highly personal, often angry with an emotional quality reflecting her commitment to social and environmental issues. Born in Detroit, Michigan into a working-class family hard-hit by the Depression, she was the first member of her family to attend college, winning a scholarship to attend the University of Michigan. She later received an MA from Northwestern University.

Piercy’s latest collection of poetry was published in March of 2011. The Hunger Moon, New and Selected Poems 1980-2010 charts the milestone events and fierce passions of the poet’s middle years, her Judaism, her connection with nature and her politics. There is the death of her mother and there is the celebration of her new marriage not only for its romantic beginning, but for the quieter details. Each of Piercy’s poems is fueled by the current of her convictions, and now and then include colorful suggestions such as encouraging her readers to attend the opera rather than movies because “the heroine is fifty and weighs as much as a ’65 Chevy with fins.”

THE TAO OF TOUCH

What magic does touch create
that we crave it so. That babies
do not thrive without it. That
the nurse who cuts tough nails
and sands calluses on the elderly
tells me sometimes men weep
as she rubs lotion on their feet.

Yet the touch of a stranger
the bumping or predatory thrust
in the subway is like a slap.
We long for the familiar, the open
palm of love, its tender fingers.
It is our hands that tamed cats
into pets, not our food.

The widow looks in the mirror
thinking, no one will ever touch
me again, never. Not hold me.
Not caress the softness of my
breasts, my inner thighs, the swell
of my belly. Do I still live
if no one knows my body?

We touch each other so many
ways, in curiosity, in anger,
to command attention, to soothe,
to quiet, to rouse, to cure.
Touch is our first language
and often, our last as the breath
ebbs and a hand closes our eyes.

Sugar Was Her Comfort

Author of eighteen books of poetry as well as seventeen novels, Marge Piercy celebrated her seventy-fifth birthday this year. Since 1971 she has lived on Cape Cod, Massachusetts with her novelist husband. Together they run Leapfrog Press. Her 1999 collection of poems, The Art of Blessing the Day includes a poem about her mother called “What She Craved.” The poet credits her mother—an emotional, enormously curious and imaginative woman who read voraciously—with giving her whatever it is that makes her want to write poetry. Piercy’s poetry is often highly personal, often angry with an emotional quality. Her free verse sometimes reflects a commitment to social and environmental issues. Rather than a comment on issues shaded with anger, the poem below is perhaps more a remembrance.

WHAT SHE CRAVED

My mother sugared grapefruit;
my father salted it.
My mother sugared cantaloupe;
my father salted it.

My mother put sugar and lemon
on leaf lettuce from her garden;
two heaping teaspoonfuls into
her milky coffee, with cake.

Her teeth rotted out and were
yanked from her bleeding jaws
by a cheap sadist downtown.
Still she craved sweetness.

In a life with too much that
was bitter, tear soaked salty,
sour as unspoken grief,
sugar was her comfort

a little sweetness in the mouth
lingering like an infrequent kiss;
sugar was the friend kept her clock
ticking through running down days.