Keziah Mason

A little poem about the birth of a famous literary witch, and the birth of her familiar, "Brown Jenkin"

    After H.P. Lovecraft’s “Dreams in the Witch House” (1932)

“Something’s not right
     about Keziah,”
the midwife tells
     the scholar father,
     Pastor Mason,
the Salem Divine.
The doting mother
won’t hear of it.
“Bad auspices,” the father nods.
“I told you so.”

The mother cradles it
     as midwife scurries off
with rags and the bloody
     umbilical,
an accusing serpent.
“Baby Keziah,” the mother croons,
“my perfect child.”

“Not right, bad auspices,
     bad numerology,
too many vowels,
bad luck to have alpha
     follow zed that way.”

She waves him away.
Anxious, he follows
     the weary midwife,
     Old Goodie Brown.
Their eyes meet.
“Tell me, “ he asks.
“Why didn’t you say
if I have a son or daughter?”

“Neither,” she says.
“Who knows,” she shrugs,
“what it will grow to?”

“Deformed?” he guesses.
She shakes her head.
“Hermaphrodite?”
Her eyes avoid him.
“The ancients write
of such creatures.”

The midwife hesitates,
taking the small purse
he discreetly offers.
“I’ve seen odd things,
good Pastor Mason,
but never this:
not male, not female.
What’s there,
I’d call machinery,
and what use God
or the Devil intends for it
I’ll not be thinking on.”

She hurries out
into the snowstorm,
the bloodied rag
held tight,
not one but two
umbilicals,
a black-furred thing
     whose razor teeth
gnaw and consume
     the after-birth.

 “There, there,” she coos,
     petting its fur,
as a tiny facsimile
of the Pastor’s face
stares up at her.
“Old Goodie Brown
     will look out
for her little Jenkin,
my perfect child.”

Then the thing cleared
its tiny throat
and after a dry
and preliminary chittering
it thanked her
in fourteen languages.

Todesblumen

One part of my family -- the Diebolds who fled Alsace in 1870 to get away from the Prussians and came to Western Pennsylvania -- retained some of their folk beliefs. One of them was a belief in the personage of The Grim Reaper. I was told of Death coming and knocking three times on a window just as a great aunt died. I used to carry buckets of water from the nearby spring to my great-grandmother's house, and some of those memories blended with the old wives' tale...

Todesblumen

A woman is dying inside,
nestled in quilts and soft pillows.
On the path from the spring,
lit by the eye of an elder moon,
her nephew returns with full wooden buckets.
By the barn, he stares at the tarpapered house.
The kerosene light from the sick room
falls on a trellis: he sees what the women
had whispered about in the kitchen —
that rose abloom in December.

(They reverted to German, called it
Todesblumen, death’s flower bloom,
would not speak of it where Aunt Lena lay,
though she might see, if she looked, a yard
from the house, where it opened.)

Raising his buckets to clear a snowdrift,
the boy hastens by the sickbed window, and there —
white, whiter than snow, without shadow,
but solid, a stark figure steps into the light.
From shapeless robes a skeletal hand emerges:
the shivered rose crumbles, falls petal by petal.
The hand extends further on ghost-white fore-arm.
Now at the window comes the tap-tap-tapping
of Death, and wind, and the barren trellis
shakes. Then nothing, and silence, and then
the keening cry from the women inside.

Mineral Beauty

An exquisite poem about the beauty of the inanimate by the great Barbara A. Holland.

WHEN STONES HAVE SHED THEIR SKINS

by Barbara A. Holland

Who can say there are no souls in stones,
and who can look at Kunzite

and say that they have bodies,

gauze ripped from the garments of the sun,
a plumage shed by luminous

transparent birds, spent splinters of the morning,

mineral and miracle, held at its climax
in a sheath of stone,

gossamer against its ending?

Youth, northern, frangible inside

drops of blue opal as if dawn had bled
its earliest moments, as if clots of sky
concealed in stone, had been preserved
before the daylight killed it;

all the weathers of the world in quartz;

mist depths of white sand shallows in aquamarine
on frost of breath inside a shell of stone

take life from light and strain at carapace

until the day its long endurance breaks

before eternal pressure from within,

Who would be surprised? Not even God

would have expected it!

What must the winds bear up
when stones have hatched:
what wings shall fan

the cold fires of the stars

or beat to warmth the white
heart of the moon

when stones have shed their skins?

Squanto's Wind (Revised)

Boston's John Hancock Tower, constructed in the 1970s, was one of the world's worst architectural disasters. The foundation undermined adjacent buildings, and ten thousand window panes began popping out and falling onto pedestrians below; and the whole building swayed sickeningly in the wind. In this poem I recount some of the building's disastrous details, and speculate about whether some angry Native American spirit might be getting even with Boston. I invoke Squanto, the first Native American to greet the arriving Puritans. By one of the most bizarre coincidences in all history, Squanto had previously been captured, enslaved, and gone to Europe and back, so that he was able to greet the arriving colonists with the words, "Welcome, Englishmen!"
I did a little digital art piece for this too, combining Squanto's portrait with the cursed tower.

Squanto’s Wind

A ruffian wind
content till now to move
through barricades of steel
to tug of sea,
forgetful of forest and creek,
rears up at last,

howls No emphatically
at the Hancock tower,
a block as gray as greed,
lunging from bedrock to sky.

The primal No acquires more force,
plucks glass like seeds
from a ruptured grape.
The window panes explode —a million shards
of architectural sneeze
scattered by gravity
to punctuate the streets
with gleaming arrowheads,
obsidian spears,
black tomahawks
of dispossession. 

What Manitou is this
who shakes his fist
at the barons of finance?
Whatever happened to
“Welcome, Englishmen!”
(the first words spoken
by Native to Puritan)?

The engineers move in,
revise their blueprints
while covered walkways
protect pedestrians
from Hancock’s continued
     defenestration.

Months pass, and yet
a lingering wind remains,
circling the sheltered walks,
lapping at plywood sheets,
a sourceless gale
that ruffles Bostonians
with its reiterated cry,
not on this land you don’t.

On really windy days
the whole tower sways
and workers turn green
from motion sickness.

Millions are spent
on a countersliding bed
of lubricated lead
to gyro the floor to apparent
stillness; millions more
from the slap-suited builders
on fifteen hundred tons
of diagonal braces,
all to to stop
the whole ziggurat
from an inevitable topple,
should just one wind,
at just one angle
bring everything down
in a snarl of pretzeled girders.

Finally all ten thousand panes
are one by one, removed
and one by one replaced. 

Is Squanto satisfied
that the tower was sold,
that the new owners slid
to bankruptcy (at least
on paper), though bankers slide
from one debacle to another
and earn baronial bonuses? 

No! His feathered face frowns
on clouded-over golf days.
His never-tiring gusts divert
the errant baseball, ensuring
decades of home-game dejection. 

It will take more than
double-dug foundations,
wind-tunnel-tested
new window panes,
to still these vectors of rage.

Token pow-wows at shopping malls
and suburban parks
do not fool old Squanto:
sharp-dealing and inhospitable,
Boston must pay!

Revised 5/12/2012

Music is Poetry Too with Augustin Hadelich

Augustin Hadelich played the Beethoven Concerto last night in Providence for the RI Philharmonic. Here he is in the finale to the Dvorak Violin Concerto. Amazing!

Science - A Poem by Sarah Helen Whitman

While the dull fates sit nodding at their loom,

Benumbed and drowsy with its ceaseless boom,
I hear, as in a dream, the monody
Of life's tumultuous, ever-ebbing sea;
The iron tramp of armies hurrying by
Forever and forever but to die;
The tragedies of time, the dreary years,
The frantic carnival of hopes and fears,
The wild waltz-music wailing through the gloom,
The slow death-agonies, the yawning tomb,
The loved ones lost forever to our sight,
In the wild waste of chaos and old night;
Earth's long, long dream of martyrdom and pain;
No God in heaven to rend the welded chain
Of endless evolution!
                                               Is this all?
And mole-eyed "Science," gloating over bones,
The skulls of monkeys and the Age of Stones,
Blinks at the golden lamps that light the hall
Of dusty death, and answers: "It is all."
This poem is by Providence's most famous poet, one-time fiancee of Edgar Allan Poe.

September in Gotham

This is the only poem I have been able to write about 9/11. It is the darkest shadow in my 40-poem Anniversarius cycle.

SEPTEMBER IN GOTHAM

This is New York, and fall

     has caught us unawares.

From Palisade bus I view

     the gap-toothed skyline,

a forest whose tallest trees

     are suddenly missing.

In Gotham, they say,

strange breezes from the south

make certain elders remember

downwind from the death camps.

There is talk of stolen watches

from shops beneath the rubble,

the discovery daily

     of severed limbs.

Month’s end, I walk all day

     in midtown,

with shoppers determined

to do something normal,

eat Szechuan lunch, browse

books, consider new software.

Like many others around me,

I pick things up from the counter,

     then put them back —

everyday urges seem so trivial.

There is not one note of music.

People keep stopping

     to stare nervously

     at the Empire State,

     like frightened squirrels

     in the shadow

     of a threatened sequoia.

The sycamores in Bryant Park

beam back the sun,

     an interrupted medley

     of overhanging clouds

     that pause, then part,

     then scud away.

Seedpods of honey locust fall,

curl brown like overdone toast

     on the pavement,

but the delicate leaves remain above,

     still adamant green.

It is not till night,

     till I turn the corner on Lexington

     and spy the dark hunched shell

     of the Gramercy Park Armory,

that I see the leaves of this autumn,

     its feuilles morts,

taped to treetrunks, walls and windows,

     tied to a chain link fence,

     row on row to the end of seeing,

flapping in rainstorm,  tattered, tearing,

soon to be ankle deep in the gutter —

these album-leaves of anguish

burst forth with human colors —

faces brown and pink and salmon,

oak and ash and ebony,

the rainbow of human flesh,

     of eyeflash —

visages still in their conquering twenties,

snapshot in happy moments,

    embracing their brides,

          babies on knees,

license, yearbook, graduation photos,

smiling at beach or barbecue,

ink fading or bleeding now

     in the sky’s abundant tearfall.

In the language we use

for the recovery of wayward pets,

these posters beg the impossible:

IF ANYONE HAS SEEN HER —

     MISSING   —   MISSING

LEFT SHOULDER SCAR —

A DOLPHIN TATTOO —

MISSING     —     MISSING

HAVE YOU SEEN ME?—

MISSING   —   MISSING

PLEASE FIND ME

MISSING  —   MISSING

WORLD TRADE CENTER

—September 30, 2001, New York City

In Prague, A Tree of Many Colors

When the Czech student Jan Palach set fire to himself to protest the Soviet invasion of his country, I wrote this poem in his honor. It was not until very recently that we had any details about his death in the West; I had never even seen his picture until this year. The square where he committed suicide is now named after him, and the Communist government fell in 1989 during "Palach Week," a period of protest and turmoil over which his spirit certainly presided. He was 21, a student of philosophy. My poem suffered from lack of details. In 1996, I learned about the students' resistance to the invaders and worked that into the poem; now, in 2011, I know more and can make this poem more of a narrative. And I have finally given a coherent voice to the real narrator of the poem: a linden tree in Prague.
This poem is Number 2 in my new edition of Anniversarius: The Book of Autumn, a 40-poem cycle soon to be published.
New note: I have just revised this poem again, adding more details about the Linden tree, which, it turns out, is the national emblem of Czechoslovakia (!): the Muse once again led me to the one and only tree that I could have used. I have also retitled the poem, "The Linden Tree in Prague."

THE LINDEN TREE IN PRAGUE

for Jan Palach, Czech martyr,
who set himself on fire January 16, 1969
to protest the occupation of his country

1

Linden in Prague’s Museum Square:

I was born, I was sown

of mother and father trees in some forest.

I screamed as the sun troped me out of the earth,

grew slowly in the shadows of tall buildings.

thrust out my blossoms at the hope of spring,

Years passed; I grew protective rings

around me. Exhorted into summer by sun

and the bacchanal of squirrels, I owe each year

millions of leaf-deaths and resurrections.

The solemn students and professors

stride by with dour looks, eyes locked

into the mysteries of Marx and Engels.

I must pretend to stand up straight.

I must not follow the mocking sun

     and its false revolutions.

I must wait for the ultimate paradise,

world’s daylight redistributed for all.

I tremble as angry gardeners trim

the arrogant beard-branchlets

that fringe my still-adolescent trunk.

I am all passion and impracticality.

My heart-shaped leaves are on my sleeves

as I greedily drink sunlight, give shade

to those below in blossom-fall, exude the scent

that maddens lovers to Unter der Linde mania,

then paint myself in hues of gold and brown,

shedding my currency in one great shrug

as summer ebbs to frost-dawn.

Behaving well, it seems,

is not in my nature, despite those lectures

on dialectics I hear each afternoon

from the open lecture hall’s window.

Much passes beneath my shadow:

across the square, crowds press

to bourgeois marriages and funerals —

the upright grooms go in,

the silver-handled caskets come out,

the church, the state, the people

move on in soot and sorrow, day to day.

On one side, Marx and Engels;

on the other, tradition, and just beyond

my line of sight that monument to Huss,

the great religious martyr. Conflict

divides us like the great Moldau.

We have lived through Kings and Empires,

bad governments and good. Everyone seemed

to think it was getting better last year.

But something has changed now:

Why do these people whisper always?

Why do so many avert their eyes from me?

Why does neighbor spy on his neighbor,

reporting every oddity to the men in black?

Why do I hear the rumble of thunder?

Why does the symphony break off

in the middle of rehearsing Smetana?

Why have the women gone to the cellars?

The earth shakes. Soldiers and tanks everywhere!

The streets are full of Russians and Poles,

Hungarians, Bulgarians, East Germans —

all of East Europe has come to crush us!

Men with fur hats speak swollen, Slavic words.

Death is here. The smell of blood is here.

My roots touch the entrails of the hastily buried.

Anger is everywhere. I hold my leaves,

make camouflage for lovers, conspirators.

Students rip down the street signs

and hide them in my upper boughs —

     the invaders drive in circles

     and cannot find their destinations.

I open my bark for secret messages,

encourage pigeons to carry the word

of where is safe, and who is betrayed.

I guess I am guilty of anti-people

tendencies — who would have thought?

Here comes that student, Jan Palach,

he’s all of twenty-one, dark-haired,

a delicate face meant for poetry,

though worn by the study

of too much philosophy, too young.

He is the ardent one, the solitary dreamer.

And more: he intends to do something.

He and some others have made a vow,

a terrible pact. He will go first.

He is not Jan Huss,

     burned by his fellow citizens

          over the flavor of God:

he is just Jan Palach from Všetaty,

and he will burn in the world’s eyes

because of Philosophy

     (Plato’s tanks crushed

          the Age of Reason).

I am his unindicted ally.

The winter ground is covered still

with the dried leaves of my autumn,

some damp, some dry and worn

    to little more than vein lines.

He scoops them up; he stuffs his coat with them,

fills his cap, book bag and pockets,

fuel and kindling for his mission.

He is the icon of our unhappiness:

he will open like a triptych of gold

into a flame to embarrass the sun.

He opens the can of gasoline,

and before anyone can stop him,

he explodes into a fireball,

a flaring marionette; he whirls three times

then falls into a curled ball

of incendiary horror.

2

Earth gives him no resting place.

     As mourners gather

in ominous groupings,

the men in black dig Palach up,

cremate his already-half-cremated frame

and send the urn off to his mother.

There, in Všetaty, no one is allowed

to give him another burial.

No graveyard dares take the ashes

     for half a decade.

In Prague, Palach’s first grave

Is repossessed. The state deposits there

the corpse of a nameless old woman.

On your way now, nothing to see —

just some old cleaning lady’s grave.

No Martyrs in this cemetery —

I’ll see your papers please.

3

Twenty years on, a crowd will gather

for something called “Jan Palach Week,”

a pretext to take to the streets again,

and one day later,

     the Communist government falls.

Your ashes, Jan Palach, will return in Prague.

I will be beyond returning, for long ago

an angry axe man removed all trees,

to the despair of poets and squirrels,

the better to conduct surveillance

of all the law-abiding citizens.

There, on the spot of his immolation,

a bronze marker, half cross,

     both Catholic and Slav,

lifts out of mosaic’d pavement.

My last root is hidden beneath it,

as leaf by dry leaf, and ash by ash,

my ghost is a receptacle for tears, and memory.

I was there, around and within him.

I, too, exploded for Liberty.

 — October 1969, New York, revised 1986,
rewritten 1996; rewritten 2011