An arrow has done its job, and now it refuses to leave. That is the entire plot of "Stubborn" by Call me Mez, yet in eight short lines the poem turns a small archery scene into a portrait of an attitude.
The poem follows the arrow's brief career at high speed. It begins in the quiver, where "lies / what hits the eyes", a phrase that works two ways. It can mean something eye-catching, and it also suggests the bullseye, the "eye" of a target. Then comes the strike: "the target struck / an arrow stuck". Only in the last four lines does the poem say what it is really about: "it can release / with greatest ease / but it will not / it likes this spot." The central idea is that stubbornness is a choice, not a failure. The arrow is not wedged fast and helpless. The poem insists it could come free "with greatest ease", and it simply declines. Read as a metaphor, the arrow could be anyone who digs in over an opinion, a habit or a grudge, and who could let go but would rather stay put.
The form suits this idea. Every line is tiny, mostly four syllables with two strong beats, and the rhymes arrive in tidy couplets: lies/eyes, struck/stuck, release/ease, not/spot. The effect is close to a nursery rhyme or a riddle, quick and bouncy and easy to remember. That lightness is part of the humour, since a poem about immovability moves along very briskly. The couplets also behave like the arrow. Each rhyming pair locks together and refuses to budge from its partner.
The sounds do real work too. "Struck" and "stuck" differ by a single consonant, so the action and its result are almost the same word. Nothing separates the moment of impact from the state of being fixed, and the poem makes the arrow's fate sound inevitable. The third couplet then glides on long, open vowels: "release" and "ease" are soft and drawn out, as if letting go really were effortless. The final couplet slams the door with the flat, blunt "not" and "spot", both ending in a hard *t*. The poem's last word works like a full stop pressed into wood.
The lack of punctuation and capital letters adds to this. Nothing tells us where to pause, so the sentences run across the line breaks. The opening is slightly twisted, with its inverted "In a quiver lies", and the lines about the target and the arrow have no verbs of their own. The reader has to supply the connections. That loose grammar is a good fit for the middle of the poem, where the arrow's story is squeezed into a few fragments.
The word choices reward a second look. "Quiver" names the case that holds arrows, but it is also a verb for trembling, which is what a freshly landed arrow does. Judging by the wordplay elsewhere, that echo may be deliberate, though the poem never insists on it. "Lies" can mean "rests" or hint at untruth, and the poem does not settle the question. The biggest surprise is "likes". After the violent verbs "hits" and "struck", this homely, almost childish word changes the mood. The arrow is no longer a projectile but a creature with a preference, like a cat that has found a sunny patch and has no plans to move. "Release" is also an archer's word, normally the act of letting the string go, but here the arrow itself holds the power to release. It takes on a will of its own.
The poem's significance lies in how much it does with so little. The title acts like the answer to a riddle, and once we have it, the whole scene reads differently: the arrow becomes a character. Stubbornness here is not grim or aggressive. It is contented, even cheerful, which is both funnier and more recognisable than a scowl. The poem also never says what the target is, so readers can fill that gap with their own sticking points. In eight lines it shows that sound and shape can express an idea as well as the words do, and its last line, like the arrow, stays where it landed.