OLGA CABRAL - Winnipeg 1909-1997

Woman Ironing

I am ironing the dress in which I ran from the prom
I am ironing my favorite dresses of long ago
I am ironing the dresses I did not have
and the ones that I did have, stitched so finely of fog
I am ironing the dress of water in which I met you
I am ironing our tablecloth of sun and our coverlet of moon
I am ironing the sky
I am folding the clouds like linenI am ironing smoke

I am ironing sad foreheads and deep wrinkles of despair
I am ironing sackclothI am ironing bandagesI
am ironing huge damp piles of worries
I am smoothing and patting and folding and hanging over chairs to air out and dry
I am ironing the tiniest things but for whom or for what I cannot imagineI
am ironing my shadow which is ironing me.

from VOICE/OVER Selected poems of Olga Cabral – West End Press, 1993

Olga Cabral, the daughter of Portuguese parents. Born in 1909 in the West Indies, she was taken as a child to Winnipeg, Canada, and shortly thereafter to New York City where she lived for the rest of her life. She was married to the Yiddish poet Aaron Kurtz. She began publishing poetry in the magazines in the 1930s but her first volume of poetry, Cities and Deserts, did not appear until 1959 when it appeared under the aegis of Roving Eye, a press directed by Bob Brown of American expatriate fame. Next appeared The Evaporated Man in 1968, followed by Tape Found in a Bottle (1971), The Darkness Found in My Pockets (1976), Occupied Country (1976), In the Empire of Ice (1980), and The Green Dream (1990). In 1993 there was a collective volume titled Voice/Over: Selected Poems (1993), which offers a sample of the poetry she published in book form for over four decades.

PORTUGUESE-AMERICAN POETRY IN THE UNITED STATES: FROM EMMA LAZARUS TO FRANK GASPAR, by George Monteiro - Brown University