4/27/18

The Sirens - Lawrence Raab

After a while we got tired of singing.
One morning out on the rocks
with not a ship in sight, we all felt it—

a certain weariness, a malaise,
if you will. We felt it together,
sympathy having become

one of the finer aspects
of our nature. We’ve drifted apart
since those days, yet we’re happy

being remembered as impossible
to resist. The legends used to claim
we knew the future as well—all things

which shall be hereafter upon the earth,
as our song put it. Everyone only assumed
we were beautiful. But we were, and are,

though not unlike so many other
women now, those who promise much less,
but let you live. It was a relief

to give up our powers willingly.
That didn’t happen often in our world,
where the gods went on amusing themselves

with their meddling, and the hero
plowed ahead, lashed to the mast,
dying to be tempted. Did we enjoy the clamor

of shipwreck? The cries of the disillusioned?
It was our job, our particular talent.
We weren’t supposed to want anything else.

4/17/18

The Witch's Story - Lawrence Raab

Everything you have heard about me
is true, or true enough.
You shouldn’t think
I’d change my story now.
A stubborn, willful little girl
comes sneaking
around my house, peering
in all the windows. She’s disobeyed
her parents, who knew
where the witch lived. “If you go,
you’re not our daughter any more.”
That’s what they told her. I have
my ways of knowing. All pale
and trembly then, she knocks at my door.
“Why are you so pale?”
I ask, although of course
I know that too.
She'd seen what she’d seen—
a green man on the stairs, and the other one,
the red one, and then the devil himself
with his head on fire, which was me,
the witch in her true ornament, as I
like to put it. Oh, she’d seen what she needed
to send her running home
but she walked right in, which is the part
I never understand completely. Maybe
she believed, just then,
that she was no one’s daughter any more,
and had to take her chances, poor thing,
inside with me. “So you’ve come
to brighten up my house,”
I said, and changed her into a log.
It was an easy trick, and gave me little pleasure.
But I’d been waiting all day.
I was cold, and even that
small fire was bright, and warm enough.