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.
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.