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

 

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.

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.