This week Women’s Voices for Change received a wonderful gift: permission to bring you five of Molly Peacock’s poems. Molly Peacock is a true voice for women–forthright and wondering, pained and soothing, urban and earthy—someone as true to the polarity of living as she is solid and authentic in every line. Author of six books of poetry; performer of The Shimmering Verge, a one-woman staged monologue in poems; writer of prose; guide of the caroling crowds of poets she’s taught and encouraged; monument on the page, Ms. Peacock is one of a kind and ours for this month. Here is the first of our October Five, presented with gratitude and a shout of how lucky we are.
Friends
Friends are our families now. They act
With rivalry and concern, as sisters
And brothers have acted. They repeat the fact
of family without the far-walked blisters
of heredity. Friends echo childhood
but stop childish acts, for they do not require
the child in us to serve. It is our mood
that friends serve and in our mirrors we admire
their faces and ours. Where would I meet
my sister as a friend now? Though I love her,
we have only our childhoods in common.
Friends help me get rid of what we’ll never
get rid of: our terror of the childhood we shun.
How sick I am of it! Yet I am it, which
my friends know, for the feel it as we embrace,
as I feel their families coursing through them. We itch
to understand what we cannot erase
but can no longer live inside of. Thus
we confide in those outside we bring beside us.
Reprinted from CORNUCOPIA: New and Selected Poems by Molly Peacock. Copyright (c) 2002 by Molly Peacock. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.