The Blight We Were Born For

by Kayla Spencer

To every girl

Margaret, are you grieving
Over warmer waters leaving?
Rage like the plague of man, you
With your red womb care for, can you?
Ah! as the hips grow bolder
They will strain from such hands colder
By and by, so live or die
Though wings of wilder feathers fly,
Yet we will weep, and they’ll know why.
Now, no matter, child, the blame:
Sorrow’s sabbath calls our name.
So, sit up straight and call it blest
Pearly thighs, bloody breast,
This is the blight we were born for,
It is Margaret we mourn for.

Styled after Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Spring and Fall

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Kayla Spencer is based in Utah and teaches 7th and 8th-grade English. She is a lifelong lover of the language arts and works to convince teenagers that reading is a privilege, writing is power, and education is a gift. When not with said teenagers, she’s scribbling down lines of poetry or deep in a book—likely with a cold Earl Grey somewhere in the house. Her work also appears or is forthcoming in The Blood Pudding, Half and One, Griffel, and Cathexis Northwest Press.