APOTROPAIC PARADOX 🕯️🌿

Today marks over two weeks in bed with Covid. Since returning from Westray I’ve been thinking a lot about rowan trees. There are many on Orkney, though they are young. In Scotland, rowans are apotropaic, said to guard against witches. Yet, they also belong to witches. Folklore often presents us with these homeopathic riddles—the-hair-of-the-dog sort of conundrum. In the midst of a feminist witch wave where we now embrace witches as wise women, this is disorienting. Aren’t witches super powerful healers? Why would we need protection from them? Many of us can remember back not that long ago when witch was shorthand for everything bad or difficult—a death dealing crone or petty curser. In Scottish witchcraft belief there were wise women—spaewives—and there were demonic servants called witches. They were not the same, but the witch hunts of the 16th-18th centuries conflated these to some degree, and  modern popular culture and the witch-wave have finished the job. 

In the meantime, I could use a bit of morale boosting. If you like my weekly offerings, please support them in any & all of these ways:

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TRIGGER WARNING: mention of sexual assault and femicide in the next paragraph, but not in the poem below the ‘subscribe now’ button. The recording of the poem also doesn’t mention these things.

Before contracting covid, I began this poem. I have been haunted by the stories of Gisèle Pélicot in France who was repeatedly drugged by her husband as he invited men to gang rape her. Though Gisèle Pélicot complained of memory loss and bruising, her doctors dismissed her concerns, saying that these were symptoms of simply ‘getting older.’ Kenyan runner Rebecca Cheptegei’s has been murdered by her ex-partner. He set her on fire. In the US a rapist is running for president, again. I wrote Ashes & Stones as a way to document historical femicide and link it to the misogyny of the present. It stands as my life’s work. Now I have finished this poem, but I am not well. 

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedI Walk in a World No Longer Warding

I walk in a world no longer warding
against its wisest women, in witch-wood
amongst whitty tree beloved of waxwing.
I speak of a thrush-held threshhold,
of rowan. Do you know her door,
its invitation into the arms of Sif*?
I sing a pome* of cyanide, roots to bind
ghosts & men, of food for sulphurous
angels—larvae of the brimstone moth.

A young tree offers me a bundle.
The ones I know best on this island
were planted for a queen, now gone.
The berries pucker & darken on my altar
as if taking my darkness into them.
What belongs to carlin, quine*
& queen yet also bowers the worst
of her rage? This is a fairytale riddle
handed down to us from our ancestors,

at war with themselves. I speak of this bright
end-of-summer heirloom each berry
marked with a black, five-pointed star.
I sing of this way-marker against elf-shot
& abduction--a compass for the fairy-led.
Rowan smoke roils & fairy blood bubbles
in the pot. Always sweeter after first frost
& sugared well for winter. I speak beneath
this word-lintel, garlanded against forgetting.

*In Norse lore, the goddess Sif took the form of a rowan tree to shelter Thor. She is the goddess of survivors of sexual assault, among many other things.

*Rowan berries are pomes—fleshy fruits containing seeds. Rowan berry seeds contain cyanide.

*Quine is Doric (NE Scots dialect) for woman