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Muriel Rukeyser
Muriel Rukeyser
Born in 1913, Muriel Rukeyser drew on many different sources of inspiration and used her poetry as a mode of social protest...
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Related Poems
Cézanne
by Alfred Kreymborg
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Painters  
by Muriel Rukeyser

In the cave with a long-ago flare
a woman stands, her arms up. Red twig, black twig, brown twig.
A wall of leaping darkness over her.
The men are out hunting in the early light
But here in this flicker, one or two men, painting
and a woman among them.
Great living animals grow on the stone walls,
their pelts, their eyes, their sex, their hearts,
and the cave-painters touch them with life, red, brown, black,
a woman among them, painting.



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From The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, edited by Janet E. Kaufman and Anne F. Herzog with Jan Heller Levi © 2005. Reprinted with permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.
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