Month: June 2022

At what age

At what age does a woman become

a spinster and a spinster become a witch?

Let me jump the line, sneak to the front of the queue.

Let me be the witch now, before spinster,

before woman.

I’ve read the archives, surveyed the scripture

and sepia daguerreotypes.

I was always the witch,

the herbalist,

the storyteller at the edge of the forest,

on the intersection of reversing poles.

Shunned until you brought yourselves

broken in bone and spirit

admitting need.

That’s why you burned my people.

We remind you that male is also human

and that all humans break.

Lightnoise

Sydney is obsessed with illumination. Fireworks when smoke encircles the city, old growth forest turning to charcoal. Light that dances on still winter buildings. Air that burns in the chill.

After the plague, people slide from beneath their doonas, step away from their streaming subscriptions and wade through the throng of crying infants and their parents, who are also crying. Inwardly.

After the plague they stand in the winter winds to watch colour move.

How many migrating moths fall to the ash covered pavements, seized by their own epilepsy, their inner compass broken?

That’s Sydney.

After the plague.

How contagious its lights, its movement-

frenetic,

garish,

intrusive.

After the plague we must keep moving, even if the sound of light invades the silence and

Give me stillness.

Let the sky breathe.

Leave the architecture be, let the buildings slump into night’s cocoon.

Let it be.

One woman

And now, I think I can play in 6/8 slip jig time, though my bow slides out of its third lane and is maybe a bit too scratchy for classical, but might fit in, for folk, for trad music-

there’s always a story with a Celtic fiddle tune, the story is as much technique as the ornamentation, the slides, the rolls, the double stops-

I can almost play a double stop now, so it sounds like two violins are playing simultaneously

when really it is just me, one violin.

One woman.

You always said I was magic, a witch.

This wasn’t an insult, you said.

So, there’s always a story with a Celtic fiddle tune and I can do that. I can tell stories. Of how I started playing beneath the paper barks, under magpies and currawongs, listened to music from the West Coast of Ireland, Counties Clare, and Sligo, and no I won’t forget Donegal where the fair folk still emerge in the gloaming-I can tell you that I listen over and over until the music merges with my bones and I feel a rhythm moving through me, and the rhythm,

the rhythm,

brings stories and though I live on stolen land-

I can tell new stories.

I can do all this.

You said I was a witch.

It wasn’t an insult, but maybe a warning?

I am one woman, with rhythm moving through her.

Then you don’t know me

Then you don’t know me.

You don’t know how much of this life I’ve walked alone, that I’ve had to be my own lighthouse, and if this is what scares you, well…

Maybe you’ll learn.

You’ll learn brick by brick, with spirit level, mortar, and grout. Eventually you’ll gauge the right elevation, where to cast your lamp and from which headland. You’ll learn to pick from the dashed bodies of your broken self, you’ll learn which cargo can be salvaged and what must be discarded.

You’ll learn that so much of your self is simply this:

Detritus.

Or you won’t learn. That’s ok too.

But I have no time for the blind, the easily seduced, searching for siren’s lights.

Lost in a shipwreck of their own making.