The dragon motif is nothing but a blade
inside a lake in a forest-green glade
where your typical Marian
is wearing a coat with arms, and rust
and diamond buttons. The coat:
she puts it on or takes it off depending
on whether. The beak of the halberd
is good for piercing and/or for pulling
a knight from his steed. She doesn’t
want him anymore. She would
be headed for the door except that
the forest doesn’t have one. The forest
has only animals, of which she is
another. Earth mother of weaponry, she
buries all arms in the ground. The girl,
no longer a girl, is more in love than
she once was with the freedom to think
for herself. The forest—yes, it speaks—
says, “Don’t you dare try to stop her.”

Mary Jo Bang is the author of nine books of poems, including A Film in Which I Play Everyone, A Doll for Throwing, and Elegy, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has published translations of Dante’s Inferno (2012) and Purgatorio (2021). Paradiso is forthcoming in 2025. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.