welcoming home your feral fierce
- Mel Shearsmith
- May 22
- 2 min read

Over the Moon by Rob Gonsalves
Feral fierce fem.
I don’t know yours.
I want to.
Your fierce as fuck feral fierce wouldn’t scare me as she did.
I can witness the power of this champion of yours as she flames
with her angers and sorrow-songs
carved wide and shaped into steeliness with spit and sweat
woven through the marrow of your bones
as you walk your ways.
These etched marks made by the narrow
the restrictions of being shoulds and coulds
of being smaller
neater
nicer
quieter
grooved into your flesh
and she moans to move with wings.Uncaged and unfurled.
Unapologetically unyielding, glorious in her flaming.
This She of yours, she doesn’t scare me now.
I’ve met mine.
I met her in a studio, blazing and mud covered,
twigged, wild and terrifying,
a protector so complete, feral and certain.
Heartsure of what she is fierce for.
Her feral purpose, a part and more than whole
with forceful fears, timid and ravenous for this unknown terrain,
this territory of untethering from too tight, too small spaces
shimmying and stomping across the big sky of bold
grounded in ancestral fields ploughed by all felts and unsaid.
Riding (and fighting) her accompanying waves of deep sorrow,
the grief of not knowing her and longing to love her well
to sweetly cherish the delicacies of this fierce face
and her spirit-sister, mistrust,
she gapes at the wisdom in her fight, the resident protector-love-fire,
flaming with tenderness fuelled by the insatiable heat
of injustices, inequalities, aloneness, other.
These stifling confines, to be sweet, sugared, powdered
and less the surprise of tongue tingling spice.
What has been buried flies outward
startling crows and fragmenting clouds,
tickling every sea bed and pillow,
waking all giants from the adventures of their underground slumbers.
Mountains move.
I smear blood and mud across her skins, howling and stamping,
churning up my big noise with big movements.
Marking time with arcs and taking up more space.
Being bigger than my skin.
Meeting my edges and stomping out beyond them
with a wild glee that asks for nothing in response,
no acceptance
no apology or accompanying explanation.
The world breathes me in.
Hello you glorious fierce fucker.
I’ve been waiting for you.