A heap of wheat,
says the Song of Songs but I’ve never seen wheat in a pile.
Apples, potatoes, cabbages, carrots make lumpy stacks,
but you are sleek as a seal hauled out in the winter sun.
I can see you as a great goose egg or a single juicy and fully ripe peach.
You swell like a natural grassy hill.
You are symmetrical as a Hopewell mound,
with the eye of the navel wide open, the eye of my apple,
the pear’s port window. You’re not supposed to exist at all this decade.
You’re to be flat as a kitchen table,
so children with roller skates can speed over you like those sidewalks of my childhood that each gave a different roar under my wheels.
You’re required to show muscle striations like the ocean sand at ebb tide, but brick hard.
Clothing is not designed for women of whose warm and flagrant bodies you are a swelling part.
Yet I confess I meditate with my hands folded on you, a maternal cushion radiating comfort.
Even when I have been at my thinnest,
you have never abandoned me but curled round as a sleeping cat under my skirt.
When I spread out, so do you. You like to eat, drink and bang on another belly.
In anxiety I clutch you with nervous fingers as if you were a purse full of calm.
In my grandmother standing in the fierce sun I see your cauldron that held eleven children shaped under the tent of her summer dress.
I see you in my mother at thirty in her flapper gear, skinny legs and then you knocking on the tight dress.
We hand you down like a prize feather quilt.
You are our female shame and sunburst strength.
Questions
What is the poem’s main idea?
What larger themes or issues are addressed.
What patterns can you find ?
Are there anus:acts present to other poetic mocks. myths. histoeicalkeliyjous ripen etc.?
What is the lyric situation?Why was it written?
Who is the speaker/addressee?
What is the occasion?
What poetic devices and figurative language does it use?
Why does it use the specific words it does?
