Free She Walks in Beauty: A Woman's Journey Through Poems by Caroline Kennedy

to mean
    that it is my nature to please and that I could,
    if so desired, pose still as a statue for hours,
    a glass or a pair of boots propped upon my back.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â And then, in my borrowed gown
    I went upstairs with the highest bidder.
    He did not know to call me
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Ophelia

Lineage
    MARGARET WALKER
    My grandmothers were strong.
    They followed plows and bent to toil.
    They moved through fields sowing seed.
    They touched earth and grain grew.
    They were full of sturdiness and singing.
    My grandmothers were strong.
    My grandmothers are full of memories
    Smelling of soap and onions and wet clay
    With veins rolling roughly over quick hands
    They have many clean words to say.
    My grandmothers were strong.
    Why am I not as they?

I Want You Women Up North to Know
    TILLIE OLSEN
(Based on a Letter by Felipe Ibarro in New Masses, Jan. 9th, 1934)
    i want you women up north to know
    how those dainty children’s dresses you buy
    at macy’s, wanamakers, gimbels, marshall fields,
    are dyed in blood, are stitched in wasting flesh,
    down in San Antonio, “where sunshine spends the winter.”
    I want you women up north to see
    the obsequious smile, the salesladies trill
    â€œexquisite work, madame, exquisite pleats”
    vanish into a bloated face, ordering more dresses,
    gouging the wages down,
    dissolve into maria, ambrosa, catalina,
    stitching these dresses from dawn to night,
    in blood, in wasting flesh.
    Catalina Rodriguez, 24,
    body shriveled to a child’s at twelve,
    catalina rodriguez, last stages of consumption,
    works for three dollars a week from dawn to midnight.
    A fog of pain thickens over her skull, the parching heat
    breaks over her body,
    and the bright red blood embroiders the floor of her room.
    White rain stitching the night, the bourgeois poet would say,
    white gulls of hands, darting, veering,
    white lightning, threading the clouds,
    this is the exquisite dance of her hands over the cloth,
    and her cough, gay, quick, staccato,
    like skeleton’s bones clattering,
    is appropriate accompaniment for the esthetic dance
    of her fingers,
    and the tremolo, tremolo when the hands tremble with pain.
    Three dollars a week,
    two fifty-five,
    seventy cents a week,
    no wonder two thousand eight hundred ladies of joy
    are spending the winter with the sun after he goes down—
    for five cents (who said this was a rich man’s world?) you can
    get all the lovin you want
    â€œclap and syph aint much worse than sore fingers, blind eyes, and
    t.m.”
    Maria Vasquez, spinster,
    for fifteen cents a dozen stitches garments for children she has
    never had,
    Catalina Torres, mother of four,
    to keep the starved body starving, embroiders from dawn to
    night.
    Mother of four, what does she think of,
    as the needle pocked fingers shift over the silk—
    of the stubble-coarse rags that stretch on her own brood,
    and jut with the bony ridge that marks hunger’s landscape
    of fat little prairie-roll bodies that will bulge in the
    silk she needles?
    (Be not envious, Catalina Torres, look!
    on your own children’s clothing, embroidery,
    more intricate than any a thousand hands could fashion,
    there where the cloth is raveled, or darned,
    designs, multitudinous, complex and handmade by Poverty
    herself.)
    Ambrosa Espinoza trusts in god,
    â€œTodos es de dios, everything is from god,”
    through the dwindling night, the waxing day, she bolsters herself
    up with it—
    but the pennies to keep god incarnate, from ambrosa,
    and the pennies to keep the priest in wine, from ambrosa,
    ambrosa clothes god and priest with hand-made children’s dresses.
    Her brother lies on an iron cot, all day and watches,
    on a mattress of rags he lies.
    For twenty-five years he worked for the railroad, then they laid him