To Have Without Holding
By Marge Piercy
Learning to love differently is hard,
love with the hands wide open, love
with the doors banging on their hinges,
the cupboard unlocked, the wind
roaring and whimpering in the rooms
rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds
that thwack like rubber bands
in an open palm.
It hurts to love wide open
stretching the muscles that feel
as if they are made of wet plaster,
then of blunt knives, then
of sharp knives.
It hurts to thwart the reflexes
of grab, of clutch ; to love and let
go again and again. It pesters to remember
the lover who is not in the bed,
to hold back what is owed to the work
that gutters like a candle in a cave
without air, to love consciously,
conscientiously, concretely, constructively.
I can’t do it, you say it’s killing
me, but you thrive, you glow
on the street like a neon raspberry,
You float and sail, a helium balloon
bright bachelor’s button blue and bobbing
on the cold and hot winds of our breath,
as we make and unmake in passionate
diastole and systole the rhythm
of our unbound bonding, to have
and not to hold, to love
with minimized malice, hunger
and anger moment by moment balanced.
Invitation: “… but you thrive, you glow …”
Marge Piercy is an American poet, novelist, and social activist born in 1936 in Detroit, Michigan. Shaped by her working-class roots and her involvement in the civil rights, antiwar, and women’s movements of the 1960s, she became one of the most prominent feminist literary voices of her generation. Piercy has published more than twenty poetry collections and seventeen novels, including the science fiction classic Woman on the Edge of Time and the bestselling Gone to Soldiers. Her work centers on themes of gender, class, ecology, and Jewish identity. At 88 years old, she continues to write and publish from her home on Cape Cod.
She has written 17 novels including The New York Times Bestseller Gone To Soldiers; the National Bestsellers Braided Lives and The Longings of Women; the classics Woman on the Edge of Time and He, She and It; and most recently Sex Wars. Among her 20 volumes of poetry the most recently published is On the Way Out, Turn Off the Light. Her critically acclaimed memoir is Sleeping with Cats. Born in center city Detroit, educated at the University of Michigan and Northwestern, the recipient of four honorary doctorates, she is active in antiwar, feminist and environmental causes. Retrieved from her web page https://margepiercy.com/
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May Courageous Citizen
Doris “Granny D” Haddock
“Just as an unbalanced mind can accumulate mental stresses that can grow and take on a life of their own, so little decisions of our modern life can accumulate to the point where our society finds itself bombing other people for their oil, or supporting dictators who torture whole populations—all so that our unbalanced interests might be served.”
Marge Piercy is one of my favorite poets. This -- "Learning to love differently is hard,
love with the hands wide open" invites me to remember that Love is not to possess or to be possessive. And, that is it only Love when it is without condition -- unconditional Love. I am grateful to have experienced unconditional love from my parents.
To love “consciously...
concretely, constructively.”
Holding not. Open.