Marge Piercy

Born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1936, Marge Piercy is a poet, novelist, and social activist. She was the first member of her family to go to college. After attending the University of Michigan on a scholarship, she went on to earn a master’s degree from Northwestern University. Her first volume of poems, Breaking Camp, was published in 1968. She has published over a dozen books of poetry, including Colors Passing through Us (2003), The Art of Blessing the Day: Poems with a Jewish Theme (1999), What Are Big Girls Made Of? (1997), Available Light (1988), The Moon Is Always Female (1980), and To Be of Use (1973). She is also the author of more than a dozen novels, in which she explores science fiction, feminism, history, and social issues. Among these works are Three Women (1999), Storm Tide (written with her husband, Ira Wood in 1998), Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), and the best-selling Gone to Soldiers (1988), an epic story of World War II. Piercy lives on Cape Cod in Massachusetts.

The people I love the best

jump into work head first

without dallying in the shallows

and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.

They seem to become natives of that element,5

the black sleek heads of seals

bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,

who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,

who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,10

who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge

in the task, who go into the fields to harvest

and work in a row and pass the bags along,

who are not parlor generals and field deserters15

but move in a common rhythm

when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.

Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.

But the thing worth doing well done20

has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.

Greek amphoras for wine or oil,

Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums

but you know they were made to be used.

The pitcher cries for water to carry25

and a person for work that is real.