February Poet MariJean Wegert

I am not a Witch Proper but I am Some Sort of Witch,

The kind who from childhood gathered flowers and talismans from the world around me, brought back found quartz and seashells and goldenrod, stems of raspberry cane, who learned which blossoms bloomed when; that the frogs showed up, the fireflies, the cicadas; the crickets. Which trees dropped their leaves first, burnished bronze in the middle of July.
I was the child that would go outside and stare at the moon the same way you nurse your craft beer and cheap wine; drinking it in slowly and savory.


I was the girl who chanted poetry, who copied out lullabies for my future kids because I knew the words needed to be imprinted on the air, over and over like loops of a web or of a woven tapestry.


I was the girl who lit candles and watched campfire smoke, who thanked the water before I arose; who left black eyed Susan in the circle of trees outside my house, because I knew it was sacred in the moss and maple.
I’m not a Witch Proper because I don’t know the rules; but I’m a witch all the same because that’s what a witch is: she knows the rules of the universe without being taught; she leans into the magic because she can’t help it. She knows life burgeons with magic and that gratitude, and earth and fire and sky and water, all bring her to the places she feels are true.

Field Song

(After Gregory Alan Isakov’s Stable Song)

“He moved on from there and dug another well, and no one quarreled over it. He named it Rehoboth, saying, “Now the Lord has given us room and we will flourish in the land.”

~from Genesis 26

I know you feel like you’re getting old
Something’s dying in you that you can’t control

Well keep your eyes open, and don’t let go

Your soul’s gone to seed but you’ll have time to sow, to sow

Now you're fallow, now you're bare
And all your steps seem to lead nowhere

Eyes wide open, heart as well

There’s more alive here

Then you’re aware
If you dare

Ghosts that speak, ghosts that stay
I’m a ghost of me
turning into a hollow shell
Do you have the seed?

You learned to say no, shut every door
But someone kept on knocking year after year
Trying to grow a feast, to use your voice to

sing

To find a strangled throat and a drought instead, a drought instead

That tall grass grows high and brown

Flesh yourself out; build onto your bones

This hollow shell will grow a tree

This dried up well will gush with stream

Keep dreaming

Call up the floods from your own well
The cracks are where the water gets through

Let yourself fling forth in a wild-haired gale

And listen for the heart who sings it too

Sings it too

Now you're fallow, now you're bare
And all your steps seem to lead nowhere

Eyes wide open, heart as well

There’s more alive here than you know

There’s more alive here than you know

You'll know

Red Roads

I think we should paint all the roads red so we can see them better at night.

And then we could live on them, live on the red roads…

A red road would be safe, would take us through perpetual dusk without harm.  If I walked a red road I could go on for miles, never stopping, because I can always see it looming on through the crimson twilight.  Things like essays or jobs or heartbreak wouldn’t matter, we’d all just forget them as soon as we stepped onto the painted pavement.  Or perhaps the memory of such things might slowly wash away with the rain, becoming a strange dream that sounds as strange to our new ears as a red road sounds to ours now.  But life would be good, things that mattered would be laughing and perfect marimba solos and gingerbread and long hours without sleep-  It looks like London on these red roads, always hovering between rain and clear skies, dusk and morning, gloaming and darkness.  We’d read stories and tell better ones, we could dance and it would be clumsy and awkward but somehow we’d all say ‘that was beautiful’ and mean it.  We’d have forgotten about being better or feeling small.  We’d sleep on the red road too, listening to the wind, and dreaming about a day that happened somewhere between a song about pianos and dragons and cottonwood snow.  We’d never lose the people we love.  They’d be there, real, in person, not like a strange dream but utterly tangible and smiling.  We could fall and scrape our knee, laughing when the blood stains the road because they’re the same color.  We’d watch everyone else through telescopes in the distance, wondering a little but never venturing from the road, because the oddity of life through the telescope makes sense from the red road, and only from the red road.  Thunderstorms far away make lightning blink through the fog, night after night, and we’d all lie awake on our backs watching and blinking too.  We’d write long letters and toss them away in the wind, because the person it was meant for is standing right next to us, smiling back at us.

The Eagle speaks to my inner child about the city

Maybe it is haunted here, like you think.

In this city whose river brought the electric hum of lights

That now net the sky like fingers, like plot points on a map

Across your so-called united states.

Maybe I’m the spirit of your grandmother

Or of the bones of indigenous kings

buried here along the banks of this river

Underneath the scaffold of the city, before your ancestors traded away

Our freedom and their souls for a few beads and mirrors,

Bullets and dye.

It doesn’t matter.

My nest, quarter mile down the old railroad trail

On the far side of the river

(The size of a couch, or maybe small trolley)

Meets you when you wander, afternoons, twilight,

And I find you in the morning, 

Almost like it’s on purpose.

I hover in the gulf of sky that the 

The river carves, trees reaching like arms

Around my wheeling frame.

My wings tip and open like an embrace.

Here’s what you need to know:

The bones of ancient men

Made the dirt of this riverbank.

There’s a reason you feel it’s haunted.

The earth knows you because it is made of you.

And it wants you free.

But we will hold you until then.

Element and ether. Spirit and earth. We will remind you until then:

You belong, but you were made to expand --

You are ours, but we push you 

Out of our nest when the time is right.