Ruth's Aria
for the notorious RBG
Because I was a hundred-year flower
the world was waiting to see bloom,
I unlatched the scabbard
for cutting away shadows from
decisions ill-made. I cut hackneyed,
hand-me-down, halftime rights
from the hands that held them, and I
returned them stitched back whole. Society
had raised me on baloney
and broken wishbones,
babel and busted platitudes,
on repeated, ruthless
galaxies of restraint. And I said, No
matter. I said, While everyone else was learning
Pig Latin, I was writing
a new alphabet, a new country, empathy’s
affidavit. While the world was burning
in history’s buildings, I was building
a door out of the fire. I saw that the law
was busy watering
weeds, so I drank rainwater and opera,
set my heart cycle to bloom. And I bloomed
and bloomed and bloomed. And left
a seed-spangled wake behind me.
the world was waiting to see bloom,
I unlatched the scabbard
for cutting away shadows from
decisions ill-made. I cut hackneyed,
hand-me-down, halftime rights
from the hands that held them, and I
returned them stitched back whole. Society
had raised me on baloney
and broken wishbones,
babel and busted platitudes,
on repeated, ruthless
galaxies of restraint. And I said, No
matter. I said, While everyone else was learning
Pig Latin, I was writing
a new alphabet, a new country, empathy’s
affidavit. While the world was burning
in history’s buildings, I was building
a door out of the fire. I saw that the law
was busy watering
weeds, so I drank rainwater and opera,
set my heart cycle to bloom. And I bloomed
and bloomed and bloomed. And left
a seed-spangled wake behind me.
Melissa Studdard is the author of two poetry collections, I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast, and Dear Selection Committee (forthcoming summer 2021), and the chapbook Like a Bird with a Thousand Wings. Her work has been featured by PBS, NPR, The New York Times, The Guardian, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, and has also appeared in periodicals such as POETRY, Kenyon Review, Psychology Today, New Ohio Review, Harvard Review, Missouri Review, SWWIM Daily, and New England Review. Her Awards include The Penn Review Poetry Prize, the Tom Howard Prize from Winning Writers, the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and more.
Art: Orchid, oil on paper, Paulina Swietliczko