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: Baryshnikov's Feet

 


Baryshnikov’s Feet

Look up and you see
a green man, a faun, ageless,
graceful as a silver birch,
a delicate fool about to embark
on the first of many Spring journeys.

Look down, and you spy
the feet that twist beneath him,
thick as the roots that anchor an oak,

Atlas feet that could support the world, 
spreading out below rock hard legs,

feet like old women, with cigarettes
hanging from their lips, as they read
Pushkin aloud to an empty room,

heroic feet, old and crazy now,
Baba Yaga’s house dancing
across the forest, each toe
a chicken foot digging in,

feet with rivering veins in them,
muscles big as a lion’s haunches,

feet with the iron grab of an old man
on a bread line, desperate to tell you
a story about hard knocks, solidity,
risk taking, great leaps that bring
painful landings, a man
who puts himself to hard use
in order to lift the rest of us up.