The Witch Series

The Night Witches - 1941

Flew over the Soviet Union,

bombing the Nazis

in wooden planes

no one else wanted to fly.

They wore saggy

ill-fitting men’s

uniforms, flew

without parachutes,

got frostbite on their faces

in open cockpits,

and cut their engines

to glide in over their targets.

Russian women who didn’t

care whether they lived

or died, flying so low

you could see their faces

glowing against the sky.

The Germans said they took

magic pills that gave them

night vision. They laughed

and painted their lips with

navigational pencils, drew

flowers all over their planes.

Tuesday Poem: previously published by Embers in 1987

To The Great Grandmothers

How did you take that first step

through the doorway of prosperity

into teeming gray Manhattan ?

From small villages,

and homely neighborhoods,

you voyaged to the gates of Babylon,

stepped outside of history, sailed away

from bustling Holland waterways

lined with leaning narrow houses,

turned your back on windmills

turning in slow motion,

Left the grit and bustle of Glasgow,

the smoky Staffordshire potteries,

lyric Dublin with its bicycles and pub signs,

windows full of curtain lace

reflecting narrow cobbled streets.

You made a clean break,

hearts beating a new cadence,

you marched into an adventure,

bearing talismans from home

full of prayers and promise.

And you were immortal saying goodbye –

like a bride made light by eagerness, and bravery,

ready to be swept across the threshold of mystery.

Then it must have been with sober feet

that you first planted yourselves

on United States firmament,

cast your lot in with all the rest,

tossed over in great waves,

as you were by the cold Atlantic.

And in the streets moving through

fields of faces, their patterns

intricate as Delft ware,

Royal Dalton, Limerick lace,

listening hard for a quiet space,

a familiar word in the din,

every inch of the air

and turf of the place

raucous with activity.

I wonder how your hearts

endured it: the dragon

and the labyrinth of New York,

whether poems or nightmares

danced inside your heads.

I picture your faces a little gray

from the shock of it all,

frozen, still as a photograph,

caught in a flash of insight:

in this enormous marketplace,

you would never be more than small change.