Poem: All Hallows' Eve

Be perfect, make it otherwise.
Yesterday is torn in shreds.
Lightning’s thousand sulfur eyes
Rip apart the breathing beds.
Hear bones crack and pulverize.
Doom creeps in on rubber treads.
Countless overwrought housewives,
Minds unraveling like threads,
Try lipstick shades to tranquilize
Fears of age and general dreads.
Sit tight, be perfect, swat the spies,
Don’t take faucets for fountainheads.
Drink tasty antidotes. Otherwise
You and the werewolf: newlyweds.

                Dorothea Tanning

 

 

 

 

Giving back

Most people think witches are a coven of lesbians
dancing naked in the forest celebrating the semen
stolen from imprisoned hypnotized males,
which they then use to inseminate one another
using turkey basters in order to create a legion of demon babies.
Well, that's only part of it.
We are also active in community outreach programs.

Amy Sedaris, Paul Dinello, Stephen Colbert, Wigfield: The Can-Do Town That Just May Not

So true

There's a little witch in all of us.

    Alice Hoffman, Practical Magic

 

 

 

 

 

It figures. And no, we don't.

Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked.
This is because most books on witchcraft are written by men.

            Terry Pratchet, Good Omens

The fight

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood,
but against principalities, against powers,
against the rulers of the darkness of this world,
against spiritual wickedness in high places.

        Paul's letter to the Ephesians 6:12

Poem: The Man Watching

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
So many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
That a storm is coming,
And I hear the far‑off fields say things
I can't bear without a friend,
I can't love without a sister.
The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
Across the woods and across time,
And the world looks as if it had no age;
The landscape, like a line in the psalm book,
Is seriousness and weight and eternity.
What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
As things do by some immense storm,
We would become strong too, and not need names.
When we win it's with small things,
And the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
Does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
To the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
When the wrestlers' sinews
Grew long like metal strings,
He felt them under his fingers
Like chords of deep music.
Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
Went away proud and strengthened
And great from that harsh hand,
That kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
By constantly greater beings.

        Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Robert Bly 

 

 

 

 

 

A beautiful thank you

Once after a dinner party, Gregory Peck and I drove Fred Astaire home.
Fred lived in a colonial house that had a long porch with many pillars.
When we dropped him off, he danced along the whole front porch,
then opened the door, tipped his hat to us, and disappeared.
Wow! Greg and I couldn't speak for a few minutes.
It was a beautiful way to say thank you.

            Kirk Douglas, Let's Face It