The Bride

by Deborah Moffatt

She waits, day after day,
her fleecy dress soaked with rain,
the hem anchored with stones
and embroidered with dirt,
her feet buried in earth,
vines coiled around
her stick-thin legs,
her veiled head littered
with leaves and dead flies,
her lips forever smiling
“Mackie’s” upside down,
her suitor a crow
picking at her gown,
and all those little rabbits
nibbling at the fallen petals
of the bouquet she never held
like the children we didn’t know about
until now: just look at her, out there
in the garden, a wreck of a woman
past her prime, time, we decided,
to take her down.