This year we badly needed the reminder,
this year we are misruled, sick, surrounded, ragged-run,
the long day thick with heat, the night drawn close,
the cycle at its darkest, and the stars not out.

Yet there she is, above us, unconcerned,
a far, clean place where nothing ever burns,
there whether we lay eyes on her or not.

We touched her once. We rose up wreathed in flame,
and raced, and danced, and breathed, and lived, and watched
what could not be become what we had done.

The moon is out tonight; the moon is new,
the earth is old, and yet, and yet,
what we have done we might yet do again.

We are the daughters of the witches you failed to burn.

What they fail to mention is:
daughters of the witches who burned the rest.

There is a charm for everything; one for keeping
slugs away from the basil, one to draw down rain,
to bless the bread, to make the jelly set.

I was born heir to charms more sharp than most;
to beat back demons, wrestle impure thoughts, make straight
and simple what the heart desired.
Shouted in tongues from heaven, smeared in oil,
charged with sacred Names, and most of all,
bound by the appellation prayer to make them potent.
My mother would not suffer a witch to live, though she spoke spells
in languages no human ever knew.

And, I, at last, looking upon these works,
turned back, and back again, and found a thread
of gentler witchcraft, wound it round my wrist:
left that assembly and its pyre behind.

I love you she texts me.

All day it has been raining and the steel hood of the sky is pulled down

close over the trees, every alder drips

with silver, if I wanted to I could reply

There are birds here I have never seen

before; the air tastes like the sound of frogs

calling, it is green, green here, green

as if there is no winter, as if nothing dies

or goes to sleep, and there are thorns

everywhere now, woven through the woods.

Sometimes you will wake wrong and feel you never slept,
sometimes your day will be a raft of doubt in a sea of sorrows, sometimes
you will regret the fact that you regret nothing.

You will be bad at something you want to love, and you
will be good at something you hate, and only you
decide how you want to proceed from there.

You will lose touch with someone you belonged to.
This is the way of things.

Everything you studied for will leave you unprepared
for at least one task you nevertheless must finish.
You will get halfway into cooking at least one meal
and realize you are missing something key.
You’ll have to decide then how you’re making do.

You will have to stand up for yourself
again and again and again, you will have to have
the same conversation over,
you will have to remind yourself of who you are
when nobody else will do it.

When nobody else will do it your next task is find
the people who will, and never let them go.

The process is slow until it is fast, like most things.
It becomes effortless just before it breaks. You have to search
yourself for what you did before:
how you made yourself write, or how
you put your words back for a month, a year, ten years, hoping they’d mend
themselves.

No strategy retains its shape, no two poems
Come by the same way. Some flow like honey, some are hummingbirds that rocket fully formed into the light, some
You carve out line by agonizing line until the bones protrude.