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.

Tuesday Poem: an earlier version published by Poetpourri in 1994

One Summer I Read 

A Biography of Emily Bronte

And suddenly I noticed

the ornamental cabbages

penned up too close

to the houses, their ferocious

color, their variegated heads

crenellating gorgeously

despite their captivity.

The fences around them are

just a little too high,

so that they have to

stretch on precarious stems

to be seen, or to see out.

Their leaves show such largesse,

reaching out to one another,
trying to hold hands across the mulchy
darkness, as if it threatened to

swallow them whole.

And they take the frost,

like troopers, holding firm to

that ethereal companionship

as long as they can, 

despite the worms

living inside them,

the slow hollowing
that leaves them feeling
like shells caught in their longing

for the ocean, a whisper

that echoes a roar.

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.