Debra Cash is a poet whose work often draws on images from traditional literature, including the Hebrew Bible and liturgy. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts, where she runs an international consultancy in workplace analysis and design. She has also been a dance critic for the Boston Globe for a number of years.
A hundred years of dreams—
I would not have given up an hour
of those shifting landscapes, the tower, the lagoon
the rough roses making a cradle around my bed.
Everything stops
for me and for everyone I know
while behind my wincing eyelids I absorb
my parents’ recklessness.
We wanted the best for you, they’ll tell me:
all those girlish virtues
a pretty face and figure, kindness to the poor
the ability to sing and play the spinet.
Inviting the colors of the rainbow to my christening,
spraying me with holy white light,
they locked out one color of the spectrum
the darkness that absorbs it all
and I blame my father. Maleficent came to his birth
just as surely as she did to mine:
the difference is that everyone knew her then
when her name was Poverty and Need
and the guests all bowed their heads. In our day
my birthday, no one expected her.
Evil, they called her. I call her
Resentment, Fury. Locked away, I dream
and no one tells me what to do.
No one breaks in. And when a stranger offers me a spindle
glistening, sexual, I sink into the pillows
and remember the worst has already happened:
I have survived death and turned it into sleep
and a dream lasting one hundred years.
When I wake
I will know my lover’s face.
If I were really cruel I would have turned them into frogs and snakes
and squirmy insects with brittle legs
not gingerbread and oatmeal raisin—
and I would have hid them under stones
not set outside as lawn ornaments.
O my house is my only safety
hidden in the deep, dark forest
where animals know to stay away
and children drift in like leaves falling
from parents who neglect them
and tell them they are bad.
I am so ugly I want to bay at the moon
my heart feels like a cinder
the wicked, wicked witch
my heart gnawed like the shrinking night.
One day I will get lucky and a girl will push me in the oven
its raw bricks making walls without windows
a house square, solitary, exploding.
I long for it, to be baked like they were baked
become sweet and sweet-smelling as the minutes tick.
I am waiting for some pigtailed Gretel,
loyal and clever and loving
to give me a shove, headfirst—
and she will be the next witch in the forest
turning the children back into children.
Although “Witch” and “Briar Rose” were not written as a pair, they both expose silences at the heart of their respective tales: in one case, the unexplored private pain at the heart of evil, and in the other, the mysterious fluttering pictures that enable a sleeping beauty to wake renewed and aware.