Adele Davide This poem is taken from Adele Davide’s most recent collection The Moon’s Song (Katabasis,2001). Goddesses They belong to their faces as only those who’ve become the landscape of their skins, belong.
They belong to their breasts, reach casually into their bra’s, feed peevish businessmen, a dying child, a distempered dog, headmistresses, the odd dictator.
They are a basin of brown eggs or milk, never the demand.
Often asked for forgiveness or other impossible things, they look at penitents and petitioners steadily, as a gift.
No return is asked or expected.
They belong to their bellies, relish a digestif of sly chuckles, and fat peals of laughter, dirty as soapsuds when a job is done.
Appetite, old friend, is known biblically, met in the pleasure of pleasing.
They belong to their wombs only as those who are sure the seed case is not the seed and the root hair not the soil belong.
Ordinary as a Tesco tillroll, they belong to their deaths as utterly as fading comes and one collapsing star feeds another.
Fortunately, there are very many more of them than you think.
Kate Foley Kate Foley lives in Amsterdam.Her latest poetry collection is Laughter from the Hive (Shoestring Press,Beeston,Notts., 2004).