once upon a time you shoved the girls you shoved the other boys / you shoved the dreamer in the outfield / picking flowers now you stand atop a tower with your hands on your hips / bellowing orders / you were made for this / you are a man / behold your necktie your cammo cargo shorts / emperor of a rubble heap believing you can pass decrees / you are nothing but a schoolyard bully all grown up / and I invoke a roaring Mother grizzly bear against you / Goddess made of fur and teeth and no you don't motherfucker / may she tower over you / and blot out the sun may you curl into a ball at Her feet / trembling / may you eat your threats and slurs like clots of earth / may they grind between your teeth / o Bear Woman protect Your daughter-sons and daughters / from dick-slinging bigots and assholes with rifles / swat them from their mounds / turn them into boys again and send them home knees scraped and weeping / to Mother. E. D. Watson
Category Archives: Poetry
“Sandra Stringer, 1930 – 2017” or, the wretched life of an old sourpuss
Since April, I’ve been hard at work on a collection of poetry based on the imagined lives of people buried in the cemetery next door to my house. Many of the people about whom I’ve written died luminous deaths, or deaths full of regret and sorrow, or suddenly: death descended like a pack of dogs.
But earlier this week, after a particularly unpleasant interaction at the library where I work, with a bitter old woman who simply could not be pleased no matter how hard I tried, I realized that some people go to their graves angry, unhappy, and utterly closed off to all possible goodness in their lives. Sandra Stringer was not the woman’s name; this poem was born of a composite of the many people like her, some of whom are lying at rest or will lie at rest (hopefully at rest) in the cemetery where I walk almost daily.
E. D. Watson 