​ Molly Stark’s Statue Speaks, by Toni Artuso

Molly Stark Statue (2005) by Robert Shure of Skylight Studios, located downtown in Wilmington, Vermont. Photo by Artaxerxes, CC BY 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

​ Molly Stark’s Statue Speaks
 
Wilmington, VT
 
"There are the Red Coats; they will be ours or tonight Molly Stark sleeps a widow."
—General John Stark at the Battle of Bennington, Aug. 16, 1777
 
No one consulted me about standing here
on Route Nine to face growling trucks, staring
bikers. In life, I never once set foot
in Vermont. Yet, since my John’s premature
prediction of my bereavement, this road
 
bears my name. Now, with John’s statue just half
a state away, shadowed by the battle’s
monument—in sight of McDonald’s and
Wal*Mart—where he and his men defended
supplies at Bennington from starving British,
 
I suppose I ought to feel closer to him
than in life when he achieved his renown
separated from me by the White and Green Mountains.
It’s odd for me to represent every frontier
bride when, today, women fight in the desert
 
beside men. The child cradled in my left arm
I understand, but why’d they give me this musket
for my right? It’s nothing like the one I used
to kill that treed bear when John was at war.
 
Toni Artuso
 
Toni Artuso (she/her/hers) is an emerging/aging trans female writer from Salem, Massachusetts. Recently retired from a 30-year career in educational publishing, she is transitioning, as well as trying to accelerate the emerging and slow down the aging. Her verse has appeared in Honeyguide Literary Magazine, which nominated one of her villanelles for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her poems have also appeared in The Christian Science Monitor and Eclectica. X(Twitter): @TAltrina. Instagram: @tonialtrina.