&

E

I am dark earth

Fertile

I nourish cold seeds

within my belly

until

yrson

springs forth

from deep death.

I am daughter of the wind,

serant to the spirit.

8

80

I dance with the moon.

JOY

The plastic bottle

(if I squeeze it right sometimes)

lets out little bubbles

-

tiny spheres of rainbow Joy that laugh and dance and play in spirals around my head:

detergent miracles.

The rhythms of my blood my breath

chant

night after night the song of changes.

I blow the embers, enliven with fire:

grown cold we are lost.

Mary Ann Hazen

SUMMER

Mary Ann Hazon

в

In spells of dryness

I tap my spring

of ancient womanly ways

and drink strength

from

cats and plants,

cut flowers,

earth and

clay:

those beings who reflect

our own beauty

changing

dying

constantly reborn

beyond time.

Mary Ann Hazen

APPRENTICE

I long to carve

a poem of precise beauty, delicate

and strong,

grained with growth and death, polished smooth,

I look at my rough word-curls and wonder.

Mary Ann Hazen

群

OLD WOMAN

Musty memories

fill the room,

wisping from thin, crackly letters spider-scrawled in once-purple ink too long locked in attic trunk. Remembering happier days

of being child.

—

you are child again once-ripe apple cheeks now drop

brown and wrinkled, with the dry spice of your dying body

perfume.

Mary Ann Hazen

M

Woman: A Journal of Liberation/cpf

I cling with a tenacity beyond hope: Between my legs runs blood brackish and bitter to taste;

1 give birth only to that born dead

and hold to my breast an amulet

with my name:

Bitter Grace.

Mary Ann Hazen

We print unsolicited manuscripts! If you have a poem you would like to share (dr see in print!) send a copy to: Jackie Wessel, P.O. Box 18072, Cleveland Heights, Ohio, 44118. Write your name and address after each poem. Be sure you have a copy of your own; we can't return manuscripts. We would like it if you could include a brief explanation of who you are and how you heard of us. Possibilities for future poetry pages are, a poetry centerfold, features of one poet, and a workshop page. Please let us hear your questions, reactions, ideas, etc. Thanx,

What She Wanits/ October 1974,