I could relish NaPoWriMo’s Day 13 poetry prompt. It’s all things witchy and magical.” Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem about something mysterious and spooky! Your poem could be about something that is mysterious and spooky in a bad way (like a witch), or mysterious and spooky in a good way (possibly also like a witch? It depends on the witch, I guess!) Or just the everyday, mysterious, spooky quality of being alive. ” Now I don’t really do spooky, but I do do WooWoo. I do live in the liminal space where magic can and does happen now and then.

My eye also fell upon a random note. My nickname and nom de plume (Bee) is derived from the Old English for been, or bean, meaning “a prayer, a favour.” It then became associated with working parties like sewing or quilting bees. And, by way of synchronicity the other day I arrived in the classroom just as the kids were closing their Irish books. I flaunted my minute Irish vocabulary, mentioning that I was nearly late because my husband was doing meitheal with his mate. Meitheal is the Irish for a working party, neighbours helping each other get work done (“many hands makes light work”), especially at harvest or hay making time. Even the teacher hadn’t heard this one. And I did spell it right! (I checked when I got home. Preen moment.)

As to the featured photo of the white calf…well, it is standing before a fairy fort. And any pure white animal with a single red part is in with the fairies.

Hedgewitch

This is what the black bird said:
You can slip between worlds
through this gap in the hedge.
Each tree's knot, knarl and burl
makes you wise to ways
nigh forgotten, all but for
those of us who fly or crawl.
But The Good People like to make allies
with some of the Other Crowd 
who've no knack for stomp and stalk.
They like silence, but can sing loud.
Because you need to know how 
to dream a world into being.

It's like this,the blackbird continued, saying:
Magic is made of many parts-
prayer, song, a pure intention
backed by your flora and fauna friends,
done by the movements of the moon.
It's the knowing when to sow,
the time to reap, the way to keen.
Magic is in neighbourly exchange
of hedgerow jelly in autumn time and
the collecting of sloes to flavour Yule wine.
It's shooing lost sheep back to their fold
and helping mend fencing strong enough to hold
any gleeful lamb who leaps too high too soon
like the calf that jumped over the moon.

And then there is this:
A hedgewitch keeps herself well
only so long until someone else can spell
her and assume her magical work
between the blackthorn and the hazel trees,
to ken the mending of what has been rent
between the folks that stamp and stalk
and have lost all good sense,
those who simply cannot see
what lives in the woods, what lives in the trees.
Or The Good People, living beyond yon hedge,
in the gap where there is a magical screen.
They who work all the magic
yet are never not seen.

 
 Copyright © 2019 Bee Smith. All rights reserved.