Marjorie Gowdy
Three Poems
The Gates of Janus
Molten pathway paved in strife
Angry mules of men pushed past ragged survivors
Pressed fiery hatred into our veins, ignored our mothers’ pleas.
Temples of gold, rhinestone streets as crushed diamonds
Painted faces haunted each dusk
Trickery deceit loud voices kneaded ours, muffled, into the ground.
The gates opened for war. No rooftop. No sun.
Gales twisted screeching through crevice and alley.
False fey heroes in the blue forged light.
Sometimes the conquered win, with secret squares of patience
Stirred evenly among the waiting.
Cries swim through stone to find fresh streams of air.
The fakery ends today.
The gates of Janus close. Peace simmers as steam among the masses,
At dawn lifts up, embraces the silvered hope before us.
A Murmuration
A murmuration of gloss’d starlings sweeps in from southern foothills,
defies a western wind, circles downward gleefully
as turkey vultures hunch over their defeated prey, the king.
From the north runs a skulk of red fox toward the bloody field
through dry leaves and sycamore balls and twigs
left by scattered sparrows.
Men sought the king in silver winter, followed his kin, sent doe across
the cold and rocky ridge. Never found him, the clever regent,
who watched light leave their eyes beneath the low sky.
‘Tis not wit nor skill that keeps me alive, the king told the forest,
true, a certain wisdom brews with age
but ‘tis raw fortune that takes one and dispatches the other.
“If we are mark’d to die, we are enough,” the bard had quoted Henry.
A felled king on the valley floor breathed in the words
as his tired hooves bent into frosted forage.
Ravens wait atop the pines. The red-tailed hawk rides biting thermals
to clouds only to dive in waves
toward the widening stain below.
When they were wee, the fox and the king skipped among dry leaves.
Starlings and ravens watched a prince grow
into an image, a mighty issue, of his own.
In January, light stretches across a red ridge toward the monastery.
In January, red birds and black birds, bobcats and pasture mites
test the teasing air.
In January, brothers die and sisters fall in cold embrace.
Winter sits still among the dying.
Spring will bury the blood.
Last of the Blue Azures
Sit still. How many times I called out to that child. He had wings, and fins.
A whirly-gig of golden curls and mud-splattered shorts.
He chases his own child now.
He holds butterflies in a weathered hand and in her tender grace
tiny fingers float just above the trembling life.
Are you a spring azure or a summer-spring azure?
There’s a difference, did you know? Spring azure bubbles in clay at river’s edge
stretches its inch. Tumbles alongside friends as the sun rolls north.
Cousin summer-spring rises at solstice and stays till frost.
Lonesome mostly, a jumper, in soft country grass it skips righteously.
I save bugs now. The dog and I catch them in the kitchen at twilight, Tupperware-top
flung among tall phlox. At this age, after these sorrows, I believe everyone
gets a last chance. Why shouldn’t the garden spider return to its silk?
Why shouldn’t a trembling amber dragonfly be freed into mountain’s mist?
Chance pulled me back. Evening lingers before the eyes of Jupiter.
—Submitted on 01/04/2021
Marjorie Gowdy‘s poems have appeared in Roanoke Review, Artemis Journal, Valley Voices, and Visitant. She was the founding executive director of the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art in Biloxi, Miss., where she worked for 18 years. Gowdy hols a BA (summa cum laude) from Virginia Tech, and a master’s degree in liberal studies from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She lives in the Blue Ridge mountains of Callaway, Va.
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