Marge Piercy

Grandmother Hannah comes to me at Pesach and when I am lighting the sabbath candles. The sweet wine in the cup has her breath. The challah is braided like her long, long hair.

— Marge Piercy

The New Year is a great door that stands across the evening and Yom Kippur is the second door. Between them are song and silence, stone and clay pot to be filled from within by myself.

— Marge Piercy

Those candles were laid out, friends invited, ingredients bought for latkes and apple pancakes, that holiday for liberation and the winter solstice when tops turn like little planets.

— Marge Piercy

I mourn in grey, grey as the sleeted wind the bled shades of twilight, gunmetal, battleships, industrial paint.

— Marge Piercy

O my love O my love we dance under the chuppah standing over us like an animal on its four legs, like a table on which we set our love as a feast, like a tent under which we work not safe but no longer solitary in the searing heat of our time.

— Marge Piercy

Menopause--word used as an insult: a menopausal woman, mind or poem as if not to leak regularly or on the caprice of the moon, the collision of egg and sperm, were the curse we first learned to call that blood.

— Marge Piercy

We will try to be holy, / We will try to repair the world given to us to hand on. / Precious is this treasure of words and knowledge and deeds / that moves inside us.

— Marge Piercy

Burning dinner is not incompetence but war.

— Marge Piercy

Holy is the hand that works for peace and for justice, / holy is the mouth that speaks for goodness / holy is the foot that walks toward mercy.

— Marge Piercy

The ruling class isn’t dissatisfied: they are healthy, well-fed, live in beauty, enjoy their own importance: fun-loving cannibals.

— Marge Piercy

Bless the gift of memory / that breaks unbidden, released / from a flower or a cup of tea / so the dead move like rain through the room.

— Marge Piercy