Spindle-spouted, grey-haired, smelly creature
with rubber feet
for hanging.
God, I want to be you.
They say you obliterate yellow jackets,
those fearsome, stinging, hateful things
that chase a human down.
I’m not one for obliterating.
(I save spiders.)
But could you teach me to be fierce?
Fierce as up in their faces and not backing down.
Fierce as recalling the fire of my youth.
Fierce as flat-out determined.
Determined as pushing against The Wall.
Tell me, Ms. O., how do you do it?
Sniff ‘em out. Dig as deep as they do.
Look straight into their beady eyes.
It’s time to reconnoiter. Feet to the ground.
A-twitter with feeling. Don’t give in. Don’t give up.
Meet them at their hidey-hole and win.
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.”