Gulf Islands to Blue Ridge
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 and paints 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, Roanoke Review, Clinch River Review, Moonstone Arts Center anthologies, and the 2023 Centennial Anthology of the Poetry Society of Virginia and in two anthologies of the Writers Guild of Virginia, among others. She has three chapbooks: Inflorescence: The Pasture at Rest, from Finishing Line Press; Cowgirl by Choice, an online microchap at origamipoetry.com, and coming soon, Horse Latitudes, from Moonstone Arts Press. Books: poems in Quilted Poems (2022) and art in the Gallerium: Extinction catalog. Her essays are included in Katrina: Mississippi Women Remember (2007). Art in spring 2022 issue of Orange Peel Magazine and Barely South Journal.
Banner image courtesy NPS.
