When Ruby Falls

By Marjorie Gowdy

“Have you been targeted by the President of the United States?”
Lady Ruby Freeman in chalkboard-white suit, crimson hat,
asks The Man.

Swept aside like yesterday’s ashes, Our Lady.
Stalwart Georgia pine,
poll counter, valiant, precise.

Slandered on screen by a middling mayor-madman.
Chased like a fox by hungry hounds, rushed to ground,
Ruby gave her girl a ginger mint.

See Ruby Falls, the highway signs say. Spectacular scenes
of cascading magenta and pearl, cavern’s secrets
cry on the face of beaten rock.

Can you believe them? Slicked-haired, pop-eyed pols
pointing wrinkled fingers at the screen?
No, don’t.

Listen instead to Lady Ruby, underground, reputation splayed.
Like the Falls, secreted to a cool haven.
Wrapped in red robes, singing truth.

Stone-hardened men connived Ruby’s fall. Slapped her heart.
Yet our bounteous bronze goddess stands to burst their lies.
She is Lady Ruby, and Ruby will rise.

Marjorie Gowdy has pursued careers that fed her writing. Recent poems are included in Valley Voices, Indolent Books, Clinch River Review, Artemis, the summer and fall/winter 2022 editions of Anthology of the Writers’ Guild of Virginia, The Centennial Anthology of the Poetry Society of Virginia, the book Poetry Ink 2022 by Moonstone Press, and the 2022 book Quilted Poems. Her chapbook, Inflorescence, was released in March 2023. Also an illustrator, Gowdy lives and writes in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Photo credit: Raymond Clark Images via a Creative Commons license.

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