Savage Daughters

This series is a project that has yet to be called to reality. But I love the idea of Savage Daughter, a song by Sarah Hester Ross. I have used her song as an inspiration for this series promoting women’s rights and empowerment.

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Unsolicited
Current Events
Title of the work
Author: Laura Gerling
Copyright notice: © [year]

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The New Divine

The wolf now prowls the dark to seek the lamb;
if we could call the huntress then watch the vale to wait.
Diana strung her bow and stalked the night.
She’d call her sisters forth and wouldn’t hunt alone,
with Circe, Bendis, Neith she’d stalk this dreaded void.

Instead the new divine will face the threat
to be the voice that guards the pure of heart.
Beyond the ancient ones who we once dreamed,
the savage daughters are no myth. We hunt.
Be not a lamb when wolves command the night, moon daughter.

Unsolicited
The Savage Daughter Project
The New Divine
Laura Gerling
© 2025

——

Patriarchy

“Was he a wizard?
His daughter said, “No.”
His son said, “Yes.”
“I want to be a wizard,” I said and saw myself
walking a twilight road in a black cloak with silken patches;
one for each story I’d told. Each different. Each unique.
“You’d be a witch,” his son said.
I squinted. “I want to be a wizard,” I said and saw myself
upon a cliff, above the sea, under the mystic moon,
wind in my hair and wildness in my heart.
“You’d be a witch,” he said again. Each word distinctly punctuated.
I smiled. “I want to be a wizard,” I said and saw myself
on some savage moor, swept by tempests;
and could read each whisper that song sang.
“You’d be a witch,” he said again, then added,
“A witch can be anything she wishes.”
I laughed. “That’s good!”
He looked relieved before I said, “Then I’m going to be a wizard.”

Unsolicited
The Savage Daughter Project
Patriarchy
Laura Gerling
© 2025
———

The Known Unknown

By whose metrics are we measured?
Our culture is right?
Right? Right?? The arrogance echoes.
(Who crowned it sovereign?)

We erase millennia of peoples who had sacred words
for those born beyond the binary bonds,
who thrived for centuries before being branded sinners.
There lies our true sin.

The marrow of identity lives deeper than doctrine,
defying the stories others inscribe on our skin.
Womanhood blooms in infinite forms –
womb and wombless beyond the binary dawn.

Here stands the true feminine mystique:
not caged but in a constellation,
each star blazing with fierce autonomy,
personal power, raw ambition, pure truth.

Science squints through a narrow lens,
blind to tomorrow’s revelations.
We need no permission to think.
Our minds are our own.

Unsolicited
The Savage Daughter Project
The Known Unknown
Laura Gerling
© 2025

————-

Healing

Mist flows through darkened ways,
Escaping now where noise and strife hold sway.
The sky beckons with galaxies of stars,
receiving mortal woes.
Air flows pure and clean,
not stale with reused breath.
A dream of winds speaking of days ahead;
a dawn when tyranny falls;
a time without chains;
a path where peace conquers war;
a world where love’s soft light guides forward.
Dancing in the darkest night until shadows grant release.

Unsolicited
The Savage Daughter Project
Healing
Laura Gerling
© 2025

————

Hope’s a Curse

No longer hoping for change.
Hope huddles in the corners.
Hope bows to fear.
Hope waits instead of acts.
Wingless, hope will never never fly.

Can exists. Can must exist.
Can erupts through cracks in the old order.
Can ignites courage’s kindling.
Can burns past fear’s resistance.
Can rises, winged with fury.
This storm breaks free, uncaged.

Unsolicited
The Savage Daughter Project
Hope’s a Curse
Laura Gerling
© 2025

—————-

Truth Speaks

Murmurs rise against the rally cries of hate:
Rights don’t end for differences.
Not all aspects of another’s life must be the same.
Equality should lift all, not some. .
Kindness costs you nothing.
Freedom does not require others to wear chains.
Love transcends surface differences.
Oppression will sink us all to the same desperate level.
The values you espouse are not the same as you’re performing.
In your fear, you have enslaved your mind.
Beneath the vitriol, whispered truths abide.
Let freedom ring.
Let true freedom ring.

Unsolicited
The Savage Daughter Project
Truth Speaks
Laura Gerling
© 2025

———–

Family Values

“Traditional values are at risk,” it’s screamed,
“lead us in the ways of right!”
But infidelity, lies, and treachery are on display.
Five children, three women.
How many mistresses?
They have traded, “Love thy neighbor,”
for “They are poisoning the blood of our country.”
While “Liberty and justice for all,”
becomes the bracing for “hardships”
which the rich will never face.
Where women are demeaned, debased, and marginalized,
where everyone, “not us” is demeaned, debased, and marginalized.
Must we be told how to live our lives,
each in lock step with those who march?Family Values

Unsolicited
The Savage Daughter Project
Family Values
Laura Gerling
© 2025

Cover-ward

The crazed winds send me cover-ward,
where pillows are the goal and end.
The insanity outside crowds close,
but I’m protected here, for now.
Would that I could ask the Oracle my fate,
but Delphi’s been gone long centuries ago;
and those who say what will be don’t read true.
But even the tempest that blows
can’t stop the angry shouts
of those who want me to sit down, shut up,
and never speak again.

Unsolicited
The Savage Daughter Project
Cover-ward
Laura Gerling
© 2025

———–

Death and Mary Alice

Mary Alice, small hands smoothing cloth over cold skin
because it’s what her father said she must.
At nine she learned Death’s language,
and to will the shadows from the room.
Mary Alice, who stared down Death time and again,
once for a too-early baby,
again for a girl with a lye-burned throat,
and again for a boy whose body turned traitor.

Three months early in 1920: death sentence.
“The girl will not survive,” they said,
but Mary Alice wills it differently.
Wrapped in cotton batting, placed in a shoe box,
kept warm inside an open oven incubator,
no surfactant, no breathing assistance, no NICU-
just Mary Alice, who kept that baby warm,
who fed her drop by drop, stood guard against infection.
Shadows banished, Death empty handed.

Her two-year-old granddaughter swallowed lye:
caustic burns, tissue melting, blood weeping.
Doctors shook their heads, sent her home to die,
but Mary Alice knew Death’s language by then.
kept vigil through the fevered dreams,
battled the shadows in dark corners,
spoke to Death in his own tongue , told him, “No.”
Waited while scarred flesh taught itself to heal.

Bright’s disease stalked her grandson’s body,
kidneys failing from some hidden source.
Just ten or twelve, already tired,
swollen and drained, they sent him home to die.
But Mary Alice knew her craft, sweated his body clean,
fed him careful meals stripped of salt and meat,
steeped the plants whose secrets she had learned.
Death waited,while Mary Alice won again.

—–

Hall of Bones

I walk this hall of bones,
where flesh and blood once stretched and moved,
where breaths of fire seared my skin,
where I faced a monster born within.

Scales lie scattered like autumn leaves,
shine pale beneath the withered moon.
Plates of armor left and right.
grey and dead in the winter night.

Talons curl like questions now,
each one marking what I lost.
The rib cage arches overhead,
a chapel to the blood I shed.

Where a mighty heart once beat,
its power gone though its grasp remains.
I trace the path of battle scars,
beneath the watching winter stars.

Monsters crumble into dust,
but something of their power stays.
Still, I walk these hallowed grounds,
where dragon bones bring healing sounds.

——-

From Muddy Water

From murky depths we rise unbidden,
perfect spheres catching the morning light—
Though made from dirty water we rise,
perfect spheres floating in the breeze—
iridescent, no longer confined by impurities.
Diaphanous shells born of grit and shadow,
each impurity a strength encoded.
Stronger for that which once bound us.
We will last where others, deemed pure,
falter in times of hardship, having known no struggle.
We are not unwanted, nor impure; we simply are—
We are neither flaw nor accident;
we are alchemy—
earth transmuted to sky,
mud awakening to light,
whole from the beginning,
complete in our becoming.

——-

A Rebuttal

You say, “lie of omission.”
I say, “moral coercion.”
As if you have some inherent right to know—
compelling me to doubt my judgment,
forcing me to bear imagined shame,
while you claim false authority.

Add to my guilt,
frame my choices as failures—
so you can grasp for control.

You have no right to judge my decisions,
to claim you’d choose better than I for me.
You have no right to seed my doubt,
to brand me foolish, ungrateful, and reckless.

You grasp at power never yours,
and force me to defend
not just my privacy, but my morals.

There are no secrets I’m required to share—
my silence is not your weapon.