Synkroniciti is happy to welcome poet Marjie Giffin with A Clear Wriggler, a poem that speaks of the curiosity and wisdom that children exhibit from time to time. Do you remember when you were a kid and memorized as many dinosaurs as you could? Or maybe it was Greek gods and goddesses, species of fish, types of shells? We used to have time for that kind of wonder–maybe we still do, if we value it enough. Curiosity keeps us mentally agile and creative–as Marjie’s beautiful and intelligent verse shows. Conversely, there are also those sureties we have as children that we learn to question as we mature. The candor and honesty of a child who “can explain about the disappearance of the dinosaurs, noting solemnly that all of us—he, his little brother, his mommy and daddy—all of us will “die out” someday, just like the pre-historics did” disarms us. A child’s mind has room for things they have never seen…containing strange fish, dinosaurs, faeries, and the immensity of God. Marjie takes time to show us her grandson’s delight in the hopes that we can all retain and remember a little of that space, even as we face mortality.
Read Marjie’s delightful poem in the upcoming “Curiosity” issue, now available for pre-order here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/. The issue drops on June 1st, online only.
Marjie Giffin is a Midwestern writer who has authored four regional histories and whose poetry has appeared in Snapdragon, Poetry Quarterly, Flying Island The Kurt Vonnegut Literary Journal, Saint Katherine Review, Northwest Indiana Literary Journal, Blue Heron Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, Agape Review, and the anthologies The Lives We Have Live(d), What Was and What Will Be, Leave Them Something, and Reflections on Little Eagle Creek.
Her work was recently featured online by the Heartland Society of Women Writers, and her first chapbook,Touring, was published in 2021 by Finishing Line Press. A new poem appears in Of Rust and Glass.