Becoming Light by Erica Jong Page B

broom.
    I will catch Persephone’s seeds
    on my flaming tongue.
    Ah—if I burn for this,
    how beautiful my ashes—
    & how beautiful,
    my beautiful, comet-tailed
    broom!

Love Magick
    Oh for a candle I could light
    to draw you closer…
    Oh for a poppet
    made like you,
    with your own lovely body
    sewn again of cloth,
    with your own pale
    unseeing eyes,
    with your own cock sweetly curving,
    remade in wax or clay….
    Oh for an herb
    to place upon my tongue
    to bring your tongue
    to mine….
    Oh for a potion
    I could drink
    or slip to you
    at some stale
    dinner party….
    Oh for your nail parings…
    Oh for your hairs…
    stirred in a brew,
    baked in a millet cake….
    I would make a stew,
    a soup, a witch’s mix
    to bring your lovely thighs
    on mine.
    I would boil bats if not babies
    & toads if not theologians
    to make you care….
    I would enter your blood
    like malaria, enter your eyes
    like laser beams, enter your palms
    like the holy spirit
    causing stigmata
    to a sex-starved saint!
    Oh love,
    I would spell you
    evol
    if mere anagrams
    would bring you
    near….
    But I spell you love
    & still
    you do not
    hear.

Bitter Herb
    If you would poison your mind
    with the bitter herb of self-hate,
    nothing can save you:
    not the lover who comes in the night
    smelling of pitch & brimstone,
    not the husband who comes in the light
    smelling of hay & the golden turds of mares,
    not the mother with her poisoned apple,
    not the daughter with her wreaths of roses & opium poppies,
    not the sister with her rosemary & rue,
    not the brother with the mandrake root.
    Having driven out the demons of the past
    we find them now within.
    No witches burn in the market
    but our minds revolve upon their own spits;
    no crucifixion upon Calvary
    but a daily torture in the hills of the skull,
    no smell of burning female flesh upon the heath,
    but the acrid odor of the heart slowly smoldering.
    What witchcraft will it take
    to bend this world to our will?
    Must we burn poisonous herbs
    to kill the poisons in the streams?
    Must we wear poultices of Henbane
    & Deadly Nightshade
    against the very air?
    O take this garlic rosary,
    this token of death’s breath,
    this possessed vegetable,
    this bulb of dried desire.
    I am sick of haunting myself
    from within
    like an old house.
    I would be happier
    as a hunted witch.

For All Those Who Died
    For all those who died—
    stripped naked, shaved, shorn.
    For all those who screamed
    in vain to the Great Goddess
    only to have their tongues
    ripped out at the root.
    For all those who were pricked, racked, broken on the wheel
    for the sins of their Inquisitors.
    For all those whose beauty
    stirred their torturers to fury;
    & for all those whose ugliness did the same.
    For all those who were neither ugly nor beautiful,
    but only women who would not submit.
    For all those quick fingers
    broken in the vise.
    For all those soft arms
    pulled from their sockets.
    For all those budding breasts
    ripped with hot pincers.
    For all those midwives killed merely for the sin
    of delivering man
    to an imperfect world.
    For all those witch-women, my sisters,
    who breathed freer
    as the flames took them,
    knowing as they shed
    their female bodies,
    the seared flesh falling like fruit
    in the flames,
    that death alone would cleanse them
    of the sin for which they died
    the sin of being born a woman,
    who is more than the sum
    of her parts.

A DEADLY HERBAL IN VERSE
Mandrake
    O Mandragora
    herbal puppet,
    little man dancing
    with your great tap root,
    small song-&-dance man
    cloven-hoofed as the Devil—
    no wonder you make such noise!
    O Mandrake
    putting out fine root hairs…
    for centuries
    Pythagoras & Theophrastus
    sang your praises—
    blessed you as aphrodisiac
    & soporific,
    blasted your resemblance
    to man.
    Like man you are tricky, devious,
    double-natured.
    Like man you curse & bless.
    Like man you are a poisoner
    & a love-bringer.
    Like man you take
    what you can.
    O Mandrake,
    bringer of fruitfulness & potency,
    lamp in