The Witch Series

 

History: The Immolations

Imagine fifty thousand

women on fire at once,

illuminating the shifty

landscapes of time.

Fifty thousand queens

on thrones of cord wood

drenched in oil, then set ablaze,

as they gaze at the men who despise them.

Watch their feet blacken, then their legs,

pudenda, bellies, wombs, their breasts

and hearts, their mouths agape, screaming

into silence, arms with match head hands alight,

hands adept at catching babies, making balms,

tinctures, poultices, offering small comforts, spells

for rekindling hope, draughts of blessed forgetting.

Smell their hair burning. Know them

for what they were, and still are: grandmothers,

mothers, wives, daughters, spinsters, lesbians,

midwives, nuns, saints, wise women, healers,

inventors, women who speak up for others,

who have little care for obedience any more.

Take the ash of their sacrifice into yourself.

Understand it as the benediction,

you need right now, to carry on.

Imagine them strung across the horizon, 

brighter than all the stars.