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: previously published in the anthology, Paterson: A Poet's City, in 2005

                                                Dialogue, 2011 by Liliana Porter

Paterson, New Jersey: The Girls 

On Cedar and Summer Streets

had names like songs,

like arias in fact,

that rose and fell

in handfuls of confetti

across the sun.

Santa and Rosa,

tucked like a holy picture inside your missal,

Teresa, Angela, Gracia,

church bell glitter falling

like the angels as they sing us into evening,

Sylvia, Stella, Maria

gleaming in moonlight.

Immaculata Concepcione! 

Palmyra! Preciosa!

Like hymns the mother’s voices

rang down the sidewalk

and girls we called Connie and Pam and Sina

dropped the end of the jump rope

and became a soft percussion of steps,

a murmur of acquiescence,

the creak of a screen door.

Christiana who got to watch the nuns eat in the convent

because her mother cooked for them,

Carmella carrying altar lace,

Caterina celestial in her wedding cake Sunday dresses,

Cosmina and Mariana graceful as boats adrift at sea.

All of them except me.

Ei -----leen !

My mother bellowed,

with an emphasis on the “eye”,

her voice at full tilt,

rain-lashed and battered

as the Irish cliffs in a storm,

smoky as their pubs every night of the week.

The street went silent all of a sudden,

As the girls I turned my back on made the sign of the cross,

and I took the longest way home I could.