A New World Order, by Jackie Langetieg

Juanita Guccione. https://www.si.edu/es/object/AAADCD_item_20021, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

A New World Order
​
after Three Women and Three Owls, by Juanita Guccione (USA) 1948. Click here and scroll down to view.

After the dance, six lovely women
take to the shore, under an eclipsed moon
they strip away their frothy ball gowns 

and one at a time become snowy owls,
until there are but three left in the dance
of transformation; the scene is set

the vision of more losing their false faces, 
see the drying tercet of trout that lie on the sand, 
a trio of birds fly high in a cobalt sky,

moon wearing a black mourning cloche. 
The women lead the rest to the edge of the lake
a dark mirror of hope where the new order

waits to open the moon and all will be 
on their way to inhabit a new world.

Jackie Langetieg

Jackie Langetieg has published poems in literary magazines: Verse Wisconsin, Ekphrastic Review, Bramble Blue Heron Review. She’s won awards, such as WWA’s Jade Ring contest, Bards Chair, and Wisconsin Academy Poem of the Year. She is a regular contributor to the Wisconsin Poets’ Calendar. She has written five books of poems,  most recently, Letter to My Daughter and a memoir, Filling the Cracks with Gold.