Witch

My laughter bites and my smile snares;

I can enclose an entire room with the

sweep of my gaze and men have been

known to run away howling.

I am a witch

and my bones are connected

to the cold rock and trailing ivy.

 

I walk hunched like a crooked woman,

crouched like a question mark

I shuffle along,

eyes earthward facing as if I long

to be consumed by gravity,

sucked back to the mud and

swallowed whole by the vast earth below me.

 

I am horizontal,

I do not tend to the stars so much,

instead breathing with the high clouds

and all the vast empty space above my head;

nothing up there but scrawny crows,

crows and flapping bats circling circling

far away from the ground,

far away from the sharp flint and wet peat;

soft moss and lush heather which

shrouds this wet, cold planet.

Ants and spiders scurry beneath

my feet, like tiny emissaries

and all the trees lean after me as I pass.

 

I am a witch

and the world is my oyster-

the world is my bubbling cauldron

and my all seeing eye.

The leaves are my skin follicles

and the pebbles are my toenails,

animals are all my different faces

and the howling wind is my laughing roar-

tearing through the air like a banshee-

my sister of sorts,

my doppelganger-

the storm holds me spell-bound

and my tears are the precious pearls

hanging round the mountains neck.

 

I see with everything-

I am everything.

Witch is my name,

and my power is found in the wings of a butterfly,

in the hooves of the charging buffalo;

it is glimpsed in the valleys face reflected in the

wandering, trickling stream

and it is present

in each individual sparrows egg,

each tiny and speckled and

delicately sacred.

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