Girls buck the wind in the grooves toward work
in fuzzy coats promised to be warm as fur.
The shop windows snicker
flashing them hurrying over dresses they cannot afford:
you are not pretty enough, not pretty enough.
Blown with yesterday’s papers through the boiled coffee morning
we dream of the stop on the subway without a name,
the door in the heart of the grove of skyscrapers,
that garden where we nestle to the teats of a furry world,
lie in mounds of peony eating grapes,
and need barter ourselves for nothing.
not by the hour, not by the pound, not by the skinful,
that party to which no one will give or sell us the key
though we have all thought briefly we found it
drunk or in bed.
Black girls with thin legs and high necks stalking like herons,
plump girls with blue legs and green eyelids and
strawberry breasts,
swept off to be frozen in fluorescent cubes,
the vacuum of your jobs sucks your brains dry
and fills you with the ooze of melted comics.
Living is later. This is your rented death.
You grasp at hard commodities and vague lusts
to make up, to pay for each day
which opens like a can and is empty, and then another,
afternoons like dinosaur eggs stuffed with glue.
Girls of the dirty morning, ticketed and spent,
you will be less at forty than at twenty.
Your living is a waste product of somebody’s mill.
I would fix you like buds to a city where people work
to make and do things necessary and good,
where work is real as bread and babies and trees in parks
where we would all blossom slowly and ripen to sound fruit.
Analysis
Marge Piercy starts off thsi poem with the description of working women who look dreaminly into shop windows over "dresses they cannot afford". The last line in the stanza emphasizes suppression of women, as someone in their heads is saying "you are not prety enough, not pretty enough" to buy the dresses.
In the second stanza, Piercy writes about a "dream...stop on on the subway", which serves as a getaway for the women. She says "we", so clearly she is a part of the desire for a better life. To counteract this, she describes the "heart of the grove of skyscrapers...[a] garden where we nestle to the teats of a furry world". This asthetic line proves to be a pleasent one in which the reader can enjoy.
The third stanza offers more suppression as she describes unique women being "swept off to be frozen in fluorescent cubes", meaning that they have ben condemned to a live of a conformist job. The "vacuum of your jobs sucks your brains dry", which is a hyperbole furthmore explaining that these jobs are bad for women, that their brains will be like "melted comics"; filled with nonsense. Further into the stanza, she describes how a "rented death" serves as a boring job that these women are to have. Each day "opens like a can and is emptpy" and contines on to be like this, day after day. There will be nothing new and exciting for these women to look forward to.
In the last stanza, Marge Piercy writes that these women will "be less at forty than at twenty" because their lives have been spent working for nothing. The suppression of women back when she was growing up was so bad that even if they did have jobs, they would feel like the women in this poem do. Hence, the "half-life blues". However, she hints that she is different from the women she describes in the poem. She says, "I would fix you like buds to a city where people work to make and do things necessary and good...where we would all blossom and slowly ripen to sound fruit." This line gives a sense of hope because she, too, has been in the position of a suppressed woman. She wants nothing more but a better life for hersef and others.
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