Poems of Politics, Muse, Feminism, & Loss

Inauguration Day

Strutting. FIuffing up their chests
Six oligarchs swagger into the Capital
City jostling, stepping on toes,
Tuxedos tight on gluttonous bellies.
Full of boasting braggadocio
they cluster before a demented man
tossing a few breadcrumbs their way.

Marina Richie

Muse

A curvaceous pear ripens on the tip of my pen
falls into dawn, an abalone shell
swirling in opal, rosy quartz, and mussel blues

Grape clusters fresh from vines, sour lemons
encased in rinds, apples on a roll are spinning
with the earth rotating around the sun

For a moment, I’m outside of it all, suspended,
blocked by a glass window muffling fecundity
until my pen tip drops to the blank page

Marina Richie

Bodice

When I was thirteen
I shook my mother’s
1950s wedding gown
out of a cardboard box.
White lace. Ballerina style.
Tea length. Scoop neck.
Delicate long sleeves.
Tulle skirt flaring below
hourglass waist.

Holding the dress up
to my scrawny breasts
in a lavender bedroom
beside a four-poster bed,
I pirouetted. Longing
not to be me. New girl
in junior high. Awkward.
Freckled. Frizzy long hair.
Pimpled chin.

Took off hip-hugger
jeans. Peasant blouse.
Struggled to squeeze in.
Iron vice. Impossibly
petite. Before tearing
lacy brocade, I gave up.
Folded billows. Carried
box to basement.
Closed my dreams.

Years later, another house.
A flood. Dress ruined.
But my arms. Her arms
are strong as we haul
boxes from a new
basement. Mother.
Daughter. Feminists.
We have no room
for stifling bodices.

Marina Richie

Spiral

His bare feet left prints
washed away by waves
as I held ridiculous
hope in my hand.

This shell, the way a spiral
is repeated in patterns
of sunflower seeds, galaxies,
and the song of a wood thrush,
my father’s favorite bird.

I wonder if he only humored
me as I made plans for us
to catch the spring warbler migration
on the Appalachian Trail in Georgia?

On my bureau, the whelk shell.
When I hold the hollow
to my ear, I hear the rush
of his last breath

there by his window facing the tidal
salt marsh as we gathered around and a wind
whorled his spirit up to the clouds
with a passaging hawk.

Marina Richie

All poems by Marina Richie

With gratitude to poet Laurel Benjamin who leads our Ekphrastic Poetry group and curates the images.

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