Briar Rose and Witch DEBRA CASH

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.

Briar Rose

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.

Witch

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.

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