Hop on your broom, grab your cauldron, and poison your apples as we head straight into all things spooky, witchy, and magical. Agatha All Along has been a wicked fun ride with witty quips and delicious tension, and we need to celebrate our walk down the Witch’s Road with some poetry.
Poems about witches have been around as long as witches themselves because out of all the magical entities that exist, witches truly do appreciate a good rhyming pattern. But as with witches themselves, witch poetry is also not always about magic, but about the lives of women and what happens to them when they fall outside of acceptable womanhood; sometimes they gleefully take a giant leap outside onto a flying broom and sometimes the lines that draw them in shift and change and they find themselves tied to a pyre. Here are some poems that offer us a unique view of the bubbling and boiling witches of lore.
Let’s go, witches, witchlings, and sorcerers!
Her Kind by Anne Sexton
We’ll start with one of my poetry mothers, the wonderful and harrowing Anne Sexton, and her poem “Her Kind.” Acutely aware of how the confinements of patriarchal womanhood affects women, Sexton identifies here with all the ways women have existed as she, too, has been their kind. The opening line, “I have gone out, a possessed witch,” shows us directly that our guide through this poem has been labeled and self-identifies as a woman we may or may not trust completely (we do, actually, it’s ok). A witch is someone who refuses to follow rules, a possessed witch may not be in her right mind. What she shows us, though, are women who nurture, women who are misunderstood, and she, too, is one of them. They are her kind, you see, but the invisible thread that connects women, a sort of magic, means that we can identify with all of them, even the possessed witch who flies out in the blackness of night.
A Woman Speaks by Audre Lorde
Yet another poetry mother, Audre Lorde makes no mistake about her subject with the opening of “A Woman Speaks” when she begins with how she is “Moon marked and touched by sun / my magic is unwritten.” In many ways and in many traditions, the telling of witches is coded in whiteness—even the things I noted above associated with witches can be traced back to Salem and witch hunts and white fairy tales. Same, too, for feminism where intersectionality makes many a white woman blanch. As a poet and writer, Lorde was acutely aware of witches’ lore and as a Black woman and feminist all too familiar with the minefield left by white women on the feminist landscape. So she has the voice in this poem guide us through the ways she discovers magic, the ways magic lives in her:
I do not mix
love with pity
nor hate with scorn
And tells us from where this magic came with a reference to her sisters who wear her memory “inside their coiled cloths.” The punch here is at the end where she tells us that she’s been a woman for a long time, “beware my smile,” and ends with
I am a
woman
and not white.
The word woman with its own line, the idea of woman with its own line, now Lorde with her own line makes space for her and other Black women. Both a remembrance and reminder, Lorde takes control of the legacy of what it means to be a witch and also a woman.
Are You A Good Witch by Marisca Pichette
Moving to some more recent SFF poets, here Marisca Pichette offers us a view of modern witch-hood with plays on words and form and spacing in “Are You A Good Witch?” The question at the opening harkening back to the Wizard of Oz, “Are you a good witch / or a bad witch?” becomes another stanza that hits you between the eyes:
Are you a witch
or a witch?
Because, you know what, a witch is a witch is a witch is a witch. The tenants of good and bad changes depending on the telling and so, just fall into witchdom. We cover our drinks out of safety and necessity, worry about being stalked on our way home, but wait! We can, just maybe, melt into the city like this:
Perched on the lip of a bubbling cauldron
I’ve spent decades learning
how best to melt.How to slide out of sight
into the creases between the red light
and the green–
Magic does indeed exist, the closing reminds us, but it’s in the power to see it in ourselves. If the legacy and lore of witches does anything, offering up protection in puddles, car tires, and spaying salt makes believers out of us all.
The Witch Recalls Her Craft by Angel Leal
How witches love their stories! Origin stories, tales of woe, tales of homecoming, tales of magical powers, any and every kind of story delights and entrances witches and their listeners. Stories are a magic of their own, by extension storytellers are weavers and wielders of a particular kind of magic that seeks to enthrall as with Angel Leal’s “The Witch Recalls Her Craft.” Leal notes in the opening that “I used to write rainfall into existence.” This sets up a melancholy tone for us, but one that feels so vaguely familiar that it hooks us, like any good story.
But this isn’t just any story about any witch, but one who remembers what her power could do and somehow, someway, it’s been lost or diminished. We are reminded that the “Recalls” from the title isn’t clearly a noun or a verb.
The floor is littered with unfinished spells
the bones of beasts I don’t remember.
The beauty of poetry is grafting yourself into the spaces between lines and Leal offers us just that with the structure of this poem. It is left unsaid what caused the pile up of unfinished spells, leaving each reader to their own devices. By turns, we can imagine a grief or a depression or some unnamed change occurring, but the telling of what it feels like after, something her mother says she also never knew how to regain, is a universal feeling of loss that starts inside and explodes outwardly around us.
The Witches Are Without Work by Angela Liu
You know what happens to witches who don’t have things to do? They brag. But, like, useful brags like in Angela Liu’s “The Witches Are Without Work” about shooting down crows (the kinds on legs, not the flying kind; those are useful). Imagery here smacks you upside the head as you are brought into the now, here, don’t forget you are present, forgetful, unseeing. There is vivid imagery of cleaning women who disappear after their shifts, bones left on plates you forget–though they are part of you now, forever.
But what use is that, really, the voice asks when you can find a witch without work who can change your being if she ate you, bones and skin and all that you decided you hardly needed anymore? There are too many things to consume you as a human formed person, so tell the witches,
Tell them
you don’t need
this lurid cage of lust and
grief,
That line break leading to grief, the space left open, telling us why the need to be rid of form is so pressing, but if lores and legends and stories and now poems have taught us anything, it’s that witches are wide, all-encompassing, magical, fearful, nurturing, and, perhaps most obvious, always with us.
