The Witch Series

Sue Cross

took herself out one day,

to the woods she’d been foraging in

for years, went out among the may-apples,

colts foot, burdock, lamb’s quarter,

plants she read , nature’s literature,

expanding her life beyond itself,

nurturing woods, medicinal woods –

learning all its secrets, riding the steady

wheel of the seasons, its comings and goings,

the small predictable bounties.

Woods she’d come to, after quitting nursing,

collecting for teas, elixirs, and tinctures,

taking other peoples’ children

on wild foods walks, collecting

watercress, nettles, ramps,

and in the spring, morels, their tiny

convoluted skulls peeping out among the roots.

I can hear her low voice, its sibilant consonants

and vowel melodies filling the afternoon shade

with the riches all around us, opening our eyes.

Herbalist, house wren,

small, watchful, and full of knowledge,

went out to the woods alone

one day, not long after her divorce,

stood at the edge of the deepest

rock ravine, and threw herself down.

Who knows how long she lay there,

awake and aware, as the raptors

went sliding overhead, how many

nights she watched them turn into stars?

Those of us who saw her

for the hero she was trying so hard to be,

hope new shoots feathered up

around her, unfurling a green caress,

that little birds gathered above her,

to sing her their sweetest songs.

Tuesday Poem: an earlier version published in BlueFifth Review in 2007

  

First Sonnet

When the family crowded into the Summer Street kitchen

I was all hers for a while: belting out God Bless America,

cheeks aglow, loud as Kate Smith on the Ed Sullivan show,

or the special birthday song we learned from Big John and Sparky

on the little Bakelite radio. Tucked tight within her arms I basked

in her smile, the cloud of her powder scent and smoky breath,

what I’d later know to be bliss, afloat on the feel of her lips

on my cheek, her drawn out kiss, as the aunts and uncles laughed

and clapped for us both. Most of the time it was more like

I was a mouse, eclipsed by the whirr and squeak of the clothesline,

the whish whish whish of the scrub brush in her fist, a pest,

a maker of dirt underfoot, scuttling around the house, furtive

and filthy as soot: watching her from the corners, struggle against

the enormity of her unhappiness, and the awful swelling of the mess.