I am grateful, especially to the ones whose names
I don’t know and can never learn. Nameless,
faceless, I thank you. You cut the road for me
and then today I came upon one who has
thrown a log across my path. What now?
Like all those women betrayed by women
before me, I climb, I find
a way around this latest block,
I grouse, I resent, I bleed where she scratched,
I keep looking ahead—there’s someone far in front:
the woman I need, toiling in hot sun
without the canopy of praise.
Plain cotton back bent over the trail.
I’ll follow her.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 21, Issue 2.
Marjorie Saiser’s novel-in-poems, Losing the Ring in the River (University of New Mexico Press, 2013), won the Willa Award for Poetry. Saiser’s poems have been published in Prairie Schooner, Poetry East, Poet Lore, Nimrod, and Chattahoochee Review.
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