"The Fierceness of Female"

For this blog post I wanted to share a portion of one of my favorite Anne Sexton poems:

The Fierceness of Female

I am spinning,

I am spinning on the lips,

they remove my shadow,

my phantom from my past,

they invented a timetable of tongues,

that take up all my attention.

Wherein there is no room.

No bed.

The clock does not tick

except where it vibrates my 4000 pulses,

and where all was absent,

all is two,

touching like a choir of butterflies,

and like the ocean,

pushing toward land

and receding

and pushing

with a need that gallops

all over my skin,

yelling at the reefs.

~

I was having a conversation with a friend a few months ago that has burned itself in my brain. This conversation had to do with my constant need to change, find something new to learn, do, hear, see, and so on. Mind you, my friend is very much my opposite and we often discuss our differences in conversations filled with laughter and a bit of loving criticism. It seems my creative mind cannot accept practical consistency although it very much exist in my friend and my friend cannot seem to grasp the concept of never wanting to stand still. 

Its hard to describe the yearning that eats at you when you want so much to have a million abilities to do more than daily life allows for you to do. So this poem describes it for me. Anne Sexton's book of poems called "45 Mercy Street" has many sexual overtones and one could pull that from this poem but you have to look further. The fierceness of a woman, to me, is the epitome of this yearning. The fierceness a woman possesses knows no bounds, it reaches constantly, never satisfied. 

So I urge you, never be satisfied. Always reach, stretch, leap for and to whatever is calling to you. 

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