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.

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.