Baba Marta

For Brendan’s prompt at Real Toads.  It took me awhile to really chew on this one. Good one, Brendan! I chose an interesting combo of Plath and the Slavic goddess/demon Morana:

I inhabit the wax image of myself, a

Doll’s body. Sickness begins here; I am

A dartboard for witches.

–Sylvia Plath

 

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They burned dolls of Morana, Baba Marta,

tired of

her winter

her death

her nightmares she breathed into the children

pressing their chests and stealing their breath,

crippling their faith, their little bodies–

her dark hair spreading

around their beds like night.

 

 

I burn her in such winters-

a landscape of old-whore petticoats,

my many faces. My many bodies.

She haunted me in mirrors with her

cracked face, cackling and blinking eyes–

waxen lashes sweeping.

 

Morana in my dreams, bringing a kind of death

to an old part of me, where sickness began

and pressed my chest.

A sleeping winter she taunts.

 

 

Baba Marta doesn’t know

I have passed the fear of broken faces,

waxen doll limbs and pulled out hair.

I saw her in the mirrors and creeks

I used to hide in.

Baba Marta doesn’t know

I let her do it now

so she doesn’t feel bad.

 

The dartboard for witches

has become a board I write poetry on,

my black ink bleeding her away

from this body I have become.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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