WITCH OF THE WIND
There once was a witch
who lived in a house made of wind.
She rejoiced in her work
as it would thaw the frozen place
that rested below the softness of her skin.
She weaved the whispers that you hear
in forests and caves and railways.
Not to scare but to warn
of those creatures who lived
to the rhythms of rot and decay.
They feasted and ate and gorged and gurgled
she feared those who flittered in dark
razor cut and stark.
But we did not know.
The people below
in the town that glowed
had allowed her to slip their minds.
for time flowed in rivers
never once had it dithered
and drowned those who kept her forever.
A few men visited her from time to time
lost within and carried by currents of Samhain.
They called of lost loves to the genesis bloods
and so, she chipped away at the chill again,
to bare their tearful loads
to bring them back with missing woes.
Then the men were caught
with arms wrapping and unwrapping on middles
in matrimony’s deathly riddle.
She made tinctures and poisons that milked the earth
to bring to the sea, snuck to sailors in the night
on whispered words of wives.
who heard the sweats of dream’s delights
which sung to tunes of swaying salted timbers
and the creak of quiet communing brotherhoods.
So, she could only smile…
clawing at crystalline fractures that froze fingers
but still she’d crawl through windows and portholes and drains
seeking her quarry within their sodden restrains.
With the swing and sing of the tide’s-tired twitch
she’d peel back their eyelids with a softness of hand
to tear them from their wanted lands.
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But she had forgot.
She slashed through her walls made of wind,
her feathered frock falling from her
in a wonton swirl of enervation
and they gathered
All.
There were daguerreotype people,
fading from the mountaintop
as time has rent them unfathomable
their faces smeared across the page
lost to families and friends and the strange.
They were ones she had not saved
made of the sharpest of blades
for retribution had wrought their hearts
into all the little broken parts.
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