Moon Is Always Female by Marge Piercy

zucchini and lettuce
    and eggplant before the long winter
    of root crops.
                       Fertility and choice:
    every row dug in spring means weeks
    of labor. Plant too much and the seedlings
    choke in weeds as the warm rain soaks them.
    The goddess of abundance Habondia is also
    the spirit of labor and choice.
                                                In another
    life, dear sister, I too would bear six fat
    children. In another life, my sister, I too
    would love another woman and raise one child
    together as if that pushed from both our wombs.
    In another life, sister, I too would dwell
    solitary and splendid as a lighthouse on the rocks
    or be born to mate for life like the faithful goose.
    Praise all our choices. Praise any woman
    who chooses, and make safe her choice.
    Habondia, Artemis, Cybele, Demeter, Ishtar,
    Aphrodite, Au Set, Hecate, Themis, Lilith,
    Thea, Gaia, Bridgit, The Great Grandmother of Us
    All, Yemanja, Cerridwen, Freya, Corn Maiden,
    Mawu, Amaterasu, Maires, Nut, Spider-Woman,
    Neith, Au Zit, Hathor, Inanna, Shin Moo,
    Diti, Arinna, Anath, Tiamat, Astoreth:
    the names flesh out our histories, our choices,
    our passions and what we will never embody
    but pass by with respect. When I consecrate
    my body in the temple of our history,
    when I pledge myself to remain empty
    and clear for the voices coming through
    I do not choose for you or lessen your choice.
    Habondia, the real abundance, is the power
    to say yes and to say no, to open
    and to close, to take or to leave
    and not to be taken by force or law
    or fear or poverty or hunger or need.
    To bear children or not to bear by choice
    is holy. To bear children unwanted
    is to be used like a public sewer.
    To be sterilized unchosen is to have
    your heart cut out. To love women
    is holy and holy is the free love of men
    and precious to live taking whichever comes
    and precious to live unmated as a peachtree.
    Praise the lives you did not choose.
    They will heal you, tell your story, fight
    for you. You eat the bread of their labor.
    You drink the wine of their joy. I tell you
    after I went under the surgeon’s knife
    for the laparoscopy I felt like a trumpet
    an Amazon was blowing sonorous charges on.
    Then my womb learned to open on the full
    moon without pain and my pleasure deepened
    till my body shuddered like troubled water.
    When my friend gave birth I held her in joy
    as the child’s head thrust from her vagina
    like the sun rising at dawn wet and red.
    Praise our choices, sisters, for each doorway
    open to us was taken by squads of fighting
    women who paid years of trouble and struggle,
    who paid their wombs, their sleep, their lives
    that we might walk through these gates upright.
    Doorways are sacred to women for we
    are the doorways of life and we must choose
    what comes in and what goes out. Freedom
    is our real abundance.

     Tumbling and with tangled mane
COLL
1.
    I wade in milk.
    Only beige sand exists as the floor
    of a slender nave before me.
    Mewing fishhook cries of gulls
    pierce the white from what must be up.
    The fog slides over me like a trained
    snake leaving salt on my lips. Somewhere
    I can hear the ocean breathing.
    The world is a benign jellyfish.
    I float inhaling water that tastes
    of iodine and thin bright blood.
2.
    We squat on a sandbar digging as the tide
    turns and runs to bury the crosshatched scales,
    the ribs of the bottom as if the ebbing
    of waters exposed that the world is really
    a giant flounder. As we wade landward
    the inrushing tide is so cold
    my ankles ring like glass bells.
    We lie belly up baking as the ocean
    ambles toward us nibbling the sand.
    Out to sea a fog bank stands like world’s
    end, the sharp place where boats fall off.
3.
    When a storm halts, people get into their
    cars. They don’t start picking up yet, the bough
    that crashed on the terrace, the window
    shattered. No, they rush with foot hard down
    on the