The Witch Series

Witch’s Test

She has been put into the furnace

and reborn again. She has held

the orange coals like bright candy

up to her lips, as Isaiah once did,

to purify them for speaking the truth.

She has nursed the sick and dying, in

rooms filled with the smell of nightsoil

and decay. She has kept several drunken

men at bay with her words, and if words

failed her, she didn’t hesitate to pick up

a knife. She has been a faithful wife,

opening herself to affection and eros,

giving him the gift of her keen sight,

her humor inciting and sharing his

laughter. She has felt both new life

and small death sliding from her

in a rush of waters and pain, she has

taken long walks in the rain to keep

from weeping overmuch in front

of the children, she has taken flight

without so much as a broom or wing,

taking everything in going on below,

tried to use her knowings wisely.

She vowed to do only good with

whatever amplitude of spirit she’d

been given, always aspired toward

Heaven, though she suspects its

less of a place and more like a

pleasant disbursement, the milk-

weed pod of her soul puffing

apart to mingle with all the other

invisibles. For all this, she must

endure a witch’s test. Here she sits

naked and shaven from head to toe,

being poked by little men, as

they look for the Devil’s mark.

She prays when they prick

her, her body will bleed.

The Witch Series

Crone Song

My face is a hex                     

made of clouds                       

rapidly passing.

These hands betray,               

and always pay                      

what the cards tell them.

Where is the beak that can peck away at sorrow?

My knees are a jinx

crusted and frozen

over, leaving me

rooted and tree slow.

These feet search

floor after floor          

for the path

that will lead me

to what must be said.

What chain opens up grief’s damper,

so its terrible vapors can fly?

A vestigial tail

at the base of my spine,

wags at the prospect of relief.

My mouth unlocks

in harmony.

The Witch Series

Bridget Bishop’s Accusers

            hanged in Salem in 1692

Workers repairing her tavern in Salem Town
who found two poppets full of pins
in the old plaster walls.

A scragged* woman who had
accused her of stealing a spoon years ago, 

and of constantly plotting retaliation.

A field hand who blamed her
for eating three eggs, gone missing,
and then turning into a cat to get away.

A man with a child who wouldn’t look

at him, nor say his name.

A disgruntled employee, who said
she paid him, but the money disappeared,
as he rode off, and then his axle broke
as he hit a brand new hole in the road.

The parents of a child who drowned

because of her evil eye beams.

Two guards who said, as they
led her in, she looked at the church,
and they heard something fall inside.

A nextdoor neighbor who swore
he was attacked by a monstrous beast
that tried to kill him, as Bridget was walking
out from her house to the orchard.

The visionary girls who were
the main accusers, predicting fits, pin sticks,
bites, and all things spectral, a few moments
before they befell the entire assemblage.  

*broken of mind

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

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Mirror Spell

You are a shape-shifter

and a storyteller.

You have spent many nights as crow

or snail or leaf waving in the wind,

for you are changeable and unafraid.

You have been hurt many times, oh, yes,

wrecked and ravaged, and then set free.

Your relatives think you crowd a room,

though you feel yourself tiny and bee-like.

Your heart’s ease sprouts from

the pine needled floor of the forest.

You can conjure love for every being,

whether flesh bound, leaf adorned,

petaled, antennaed or furred.

You carry every kiss, every compliment,

every lightening you ever walked away with,

in a little suitcase behind your eyelids.

Right now, you are long overdue

for a voyage on waves of bliss.

Just write your desires across the sky

in the swiftly moving alphabet of birds.

The Witch Series

 

Tex

I was the witch of Religion class,

because my hair curtained

my face, when I read aloud,

and when this nun interrupted me

to ask whattt? I didn’t get it,

and I repeated my version of

what, with its softer ending,

back to her three times,

until she turned red and said,

I was saying that word all wrong.

My T’s, back then, were Paterson T’s.

They fell short of the sound on purpose.

They were about a slow fade

which is better than the sudden

death this city was trying to avoid,

and so was I. What with no money

for college, the future was pretty uncertain.

But she insisted I hit those T’s

so hard, every time I got to a what

or a that in the Old Testament,

that I giggled throughout

my passage, which was

sacrilegious on top of ignorant.

That’s when she called me a witch.

So yeah, this felt like Gunsmoke,

and her bullets bounced right off of me, 

because I was a witch, a strega, in fact,

from a big Sicilian neighborhood.

I pictured her shredding her veil

every time she passed a nail, and

wished it so. Then I made myself

disappear for the rest of the year.

I scried into the future and knew

some day at a high school reunion

I would walk right past her,

and her little cowboy swagger,

as if none of us had ever been

afraid of her, as if she were

just a rerun on TV.

The Witch series

                                             Drawing by Rima Staines
Nana
 
Her voice curdled milk, her words hatcheting

the air around us, as we sat, big contemplative
lumps around the TV. She, the antithesis of ennui,
couldn't see the cloud hanging over us.
Forget sympathy. Too many things needed doing, 
shadows and creepings everywhere.

She put hexes on our father, for making too little,

and spending too much at the gin mill,

gave our mother venomous handouts,

drove her ashen with vexation,

cleaned our filthy house,

breathing incantations, rag in hand,

poking around with the vacuum wand,

spraying us all with Windex, and condemnation.

Only the baby was innocent.

To babies she was a smoocher, a laugher,

all goodness and light. At two it was all over;

they turned rogue, like the rest of us.

No candy houses to tempt us into cooperation.

Only vinegar, spitfire, a daily poison mushroom

to toughen body and spirit, a list of standards

that flew like a flag from the rooftop,

and orders barked out by the hour,

with a minute hand’s patience.

If we didn’t jump, she was a stubby cyclone,

doing whatever it was herself, then calling us

names until we wanted to hurt her too,

to startle her into silence, until she threatened

to put her head in the oven unless we let up.

She pushed, and we pushed back, until she went

blind at the sight of us. Then we haunted her

like the ghosts we’d become, howling with
laughter as she went about her rituals, sewing
God knows what into our clothes, as she 
did the mending, stirring the steaming
cauldron, or wielding her broom.

Tuesday Poem: previously published by Icarus Rising in 2001

painting by Sally Noble

Crow Woman

sits up black as humid earth,

rises out of a wallow of water

and humus, black and stake-burnt

for harboring knowledge,

for power enough say no,

witch woman, cinder saint,

shakes a tail feather loose

and delivers a baby,

footprints filling with ooze

in her wake, as she struts her

reek of passion, muck of sexuality,

stubborn blood that will not come out,

crow woman, shaven headed

intimate of trees and tinctures,

tarred and feathered adultress,

sticky baby you can’t let go of,

nodding earthward, flying, flying,

landing you in the brambles,

earth angel, flying the highways

commuting, commuting

the sentence, the sentence of night,

and you, and you with your sharp

crow eating night kill eyes,

dare you to follow,

dare you to try

to get rid of her.