Women Dream

Women bowed over their babies that cry,

Or women bowed over their typewriter keys,

Young women in the theater kicking high,

Or old women scrubbing floors on their knees;

Women dragging their ravished flesh through life,

Or women with starved nostrils wondering;

Women masters or slaves, at peace or in strife,

Are all holding in their breasts the same thing:

They dream themselves watching a limpid ocean;

Under the tree of life they watch for ships,

Till the wind, stroking the branches to motion,

Blows love, a sudden petal, on their lips.