Hymn For Lady Word

by Mary B. Moore

I think Woe to you little people,
Sister Mary Rose’s scariest line,

and swat the gnat, an apostrophe
with wings, into oblivion.

I leave the flies alone.
Two buzz by me now, bodies blue

and teal-green tinged bronze,
raku’s colors. God made the world

by word, Sister said: He conjured
the flies’ beauty, even the stink bug

on the window sill, and generous
to a fault, adorned its shield-shaped wings

and armor with marmorated
ripples, a legacy,

that and progeny. Sister Mary Rose
might have been a kid herself.

She threw a mean softball pitch,
the Dominican habit’s wide white sleeves

belling as she wound up and
let go. Her gold wedding band flashed,

and she almost lifted off,
and the red-stitched ball

headed straight for me, moon enlarging
as it came, a giant O I hit away,

shivering bat to arm to spine,
and ran lickety-split home.

Sister Mary Rose pitched phonemes
in class, wrote a liturgy

of sounds on the board
and conducted our chorus:

the vowels opened our mouths,
the consonants hummed

and lisped our lips—sounds
that with a sound could be a word.

I wondered if the Lord wore
a wedding band, if He had a hand,

and were we flies,
irks, stinks, or more to Him.

She was Lady to His Word.
No wonder she wielded woes

and syllables, and I, a minim,
chanted Awe and Be and Oh.

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Mary B. Moore’s forthcoming poetry collection Amanda Chimera will be out in 2025 from Madville Publishing. Her poetry books include Dear If (Orison Books, 2022); Flicker (Dogfish Head Prize, 2016); The Book Of Snow (Cleveland State U Poetry Center, 1997); and the prize-winning chapbooks Amanda and the Man Soul and Eating the Light. Poems are forthcoming in POETRY, Catamaran, Artemis, and appeared lately in Birmingham Poetry Review (BPR), NELLE, Nimrod, and more. She has received BPR’s 2023 Collins Prize; NELLE’s 2019 Three Sisters Award; and the Second Place award in Nimrod’s 2017 Pablo Neruda Prize.