2 poems
Spellcasters
…[T]here’s something almost mythical about the Brontë creation story, the idea of these three isolated young women writing so desperately that the words
were almost flung on to the page. Ted Hughes called them [Charlotte, Emily, Anne] the “three weird sisters”, intentionally summoning Macbeth’s blasted
heath to Haworth parsonage.
—Sarah Hughes, “Why those subversive Brontë sisters still hypnotise us,” The Guardian
Weird, you say? Well, fair enough—
seeing how we’re sat, hellbent
at books & candle-lit. Nocturnal
truth: we sweep aside polished
cutlery, cooled remnants
of the feast, circling round
the family table to conjure
gothic plots, sometimes walking
widdershins. & weird is
striding out by day?— a steady pace
past all things mechanical, the church
bells marking time & clattering
of textile mills that drove
the fairy folk away. No secret
that we’re no one’s darlings,
just the curate’s girls whose bit
of brogue to village ears seems
a heathen tongue. If jumping
stiles is weird, we’ll take it—tired
of seams & taming, watch us curl
into a snooze with foxes, wake up
mouthy & magnificent. Our habitation’s
where the air’s grown thin & walls
between worlds weaken, poised
beneath the high stones’
shadows where the atmosphere
is sizzling & supercharged. We grew up
tossing elf-bolts, watched them skim
the surface of the stream, muslin dresses
hiked thigh-high as we shimmied
up the rock face. Weird is marshalling
the high, cold clouds, mastering
all aspects of moonlight & mist,
charms that tear the veil of domesticity—
here’s heather Charlotte plucked at summer’s
height; for wealth & weal, a potent
crumb, a disused spider web. For love,
Anne, would you advise rose quartz
as steady flame? When the east
wind turns malevolent, salt lays down
a protective circle, & I banish bad luck
with a bulb planted in a page’s ash.
From the land we draw the bond of blood
that was our mother’s benediction & call
on all the green ones to bless all those
who fight for crusts. We call on air &
fire, water, earth & spirit: let them lift
toxins from the well, plump up drying
peat, rule the rain to stay the floods &
heal the anchoring hedges. May they
roll back the besmirching smoke
that the ancient forest might rise again,
more real than Birnam wood. Bring back
sweet chestnut, beech, & red oak, rich
soil & verdant canopies, lemon slug,
purple emperor, wood anemone.
We ask benevolence for the bees,
the gift of summer in a jar. What good
are words if they don’t weave a web
that spans the centuries to summon
a sisterhood of destiny? Let them walk
the rugged earth & know we have arrived.
Errant Queen
Six ravens are kept at the Tower of London; legend has it that the kingdom will fall if they leave. An official raven master cares for the roost. Merlina, an
admired raven queen, vanished from the grounds in January 2021.
Smart girl, you knew the rowdy moves
that garner gestures of affection,
feathers arrayed to finest sheen,
glimpses of iridescent blue and indigo—
queen of an unkindness bound
by the prophecy your kin’s departure
will foretell a kingdom’s fall. How vivid
the high fashion of your heraldic ruff,
the silver knotwork that edges
your eye—pondwater pearled
with ice. Mischief diffused
your days—acrobatics on the green
and fluent mimicry of assembly calls
that charmed crows down from trees…
you flew toward a hand outheld,
a biscuit soaked in blood. One queen
may rule through war’s intrigues;
another through benevolence,
masked and poised even in her grief.
What summoned you beyond
the staked ground of convention,
the safety of a fox-proof cage, to lift off
through the season’s hammered metal sky,
over the plane trees’ diminished crowns?
Jane Satterfield’s most recent book is Apocalypse Mix, awarded the Autumn House Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowship, the 49th Parallel Award for Poetry from Bellingham Review, the Ledbury Poetry Festival Prize, and more. New poetry and essays appear in The Common, Ecotone, Literary Matters, The Missouri Review, Orion, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is married to poet Ned Balbo and lives in Baltimore, where she is a professor of writing at Loyola University Maryland.