I’ve long wondered about that osprey,
solitary, bent, eyes down,
perched on a pylon against north winds.
Ship Island refugee,
battered cup of lost souls.
Quartz as sand stings in the blow.
Rubbed rock like crushed ice
running from blue hills a million years south
through rivers, bayous
to briny sea.
But here, atop Virginia pine
streamside,
this Osprey is heads up, eyes straight.
Waiting to float above younger stones,
fishing for fresh brown trout.
Marjorie Gowdy writes at home in the Blue Ridge mountains of Callaway, VA. Her poetry has been published in a number of journals, including the international Friends Journal, Artemis, Streetlight, Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, the Journal of the Virginia Writers Project, Clinch River Review, Moonstone Arts Center anthologies, and 2023 Centennial Anthology of the Poetry Society of Virginia.
She has three chapbooks: Inflorescence: The Pasture at Rest, from Finishing Line Press; Cowgirl by Choice, an online microchap at origamipoetry.com; and in summer 2023, Horse Latitudes from Moonstone Arts Press. In 2023, Gowdy received first prize for poetry at Field Guide magazine. Her essays are included in Katrina: Mississippi Remember (2007).
“My work tends to be about connections: connections between nature and the life of humans, connections between geography and the soul, the connection to all of us from the hands of a fickle fate.”