The Goddess, a poem by Mary McAvoy

eastern tiger swallowtail -female
Photo by Mary McAvoy

The Goddess
by Mary McAvoy

Her lilt doesn’t float on summer breezes,
it plows through them
demanding of the blades of grass and the flower’s petals
and the rays of the sun,
“Hear me! See me! Make way for me!”

Ants stop their work, alert to the reverberations of the tromping of her pudgy feet.
Birds call to one another, “Who is she, that her song is so sweet?”

She doesn’t form full sentences,
yet, through the hours of the sunny morning, with no rest,
her broken babble of words and sound
commands the universe to hear her, to do her will.

“You are all here for me!  Air, caress my skin!
Sun, warm me and make my curls dazzling in your light!
Move, brother, the sandbox is mine!”

(He doesn’t flinch in his play.
He knows that, without a care, she’ll be off, like a butterfly,
to alight briefly elsewhere.)

Her song turns to shriek and neighbors pause, “Is she hurt?”
But her cascade of continuance into a made-up melody proclaims that she is well
and inside they smile.

From the microcosm to the macrocosm,
all give homage, for she is Cleopatra,
all love her, for she is Aphrodite,
all watch her in awe, for she is Helen.