The Return
By Narya Rose Deckard
The morning undresses
light that orbits through Libra.
I drag down
like a boulder into water.
Things I fail
to think of, obsessions
that drive me, this layer of skin
that holds me together. Act out of habit
and instinct. Do we ever make
conscious decisions? What if what we do
is all integrated, all change,
how Sir Gawain comes home
after he faced death,
after he met the Green Knight
who only nicked his neck,
he returns to Arthur just as rain returns
after a long journey
from ocean to sky to land,
to my roof and rain barrel,
but Sir Gawain stands ashamed, believing
he’s a false knight,
the green girdle held before the king,
his eyes downcast, saying I failed, I failed,
but the king laughs, for the rain
that has left and returned
has not failed, but transformed.
The Woman in the Hollow
By Narya Rose Deckard
Her shadow runed into soil
like moss molding stone. She found
sunrise long beyond painted rust of sky
between coyote calls and mineral breath
of woods. She bathed in Spring Creek naked
before the forest that saw only natural figures
of deer, coyote, woman, for all drink
from its rush of blood. Winter patches of light
her haven, hearth’s stone
reluctant to crack winter’s stagnancy; acorns
and rose hips, white pine and hawthorn filled
her lean hunger. She and her dogs climbed
past tangle of briar and creeper to a ridge stricken
of shadow where she drank the sun like wine, conjured
memory of worlds beyond the hollow.
Now summerblind among hills beneath mountain’s
metamorphic quilt of ghosts, she holds meadows
in the hollow of her hands:
yarrow, goldenrod, and boneset
answer her bewilderment.
Narya Rose Deckard
Narya Rose Deckard, an Appalachian poet, is the author of Wolfcraft, which won Broken Tribe Press’s MFA Graduate Award, and the winner of the Susan Laughter Meyers Poetry Fellowship Award. She has poems curated in journals such as Dead Mule School, Eternal Haunted Summer,
Kakalak, and the Weatherford Award winning anthology Had I a Dove. She received her MFA in poetry from Lenoir-Rhyne University, where she now teaches English and Creative Writing. She lives with her husband, cats, dog, and chickens. naryawithwings.com
Photo credit: Kaylin Pacheco
