If your stake in love is a half-starved cat,
or a one-eyed, slip-winged crow,
strayed from the moor’s chill cauldron;
if your greasy walls are slimed with damp,
and a toad squats sentinel under the leaning tub;
if the slates gape down in greening drifts,
and the dank-gathered limbs
of the elder, the thorn, the mouldering turfs
smoke, bitter, thick,
choking the rattling lungs
and scribing the red-rimmed eye;
if you cry in your ugliness, twist in your pain,
old and tired,
lying alone in your ice-thin, tangled bed,
the pension a paper dream when your only need is love,
then bitterness becomes ill-wishing,
and anguished fear broods through your evil eye...
I, too, have a birch-twig broom, waiting -
for worm casts;
or, maybe
(it could be so easy)
for when I come to be a witch.
(October, 1985)
