The Witches
My sister’s screams
brought Mummy running:
Did you push her?
They drove to the hospital
leaving me alone in the house.
I read a book by the window
until I couldn’t see the words.
Too scared to turn on the light,
I watched ghostly white roses
disappear into the dark.
Once, in a fever, I’d dreamed
of witches who lived in the loft
flying through the hatch.
Now they crouched
behind the wings of my chair.
I tried not to breathe,
pretending to be dead
like the stone girl in the churchyard
or my sister if all her blood
rolled out of her leg.
If she died, people
would think I was sad.
The witches knew the truth –
smelling my wickedness
with huge hooked noses.
About this poem
This poem was included in Best Scottish Poems 2012. Best Scottish Poems is an online publication, consisting of 20 poems chosen by a different editor each year, with comments by the editor and poets. It provides a personal overview of a year of Scottish poetry. The editors in 2012 were Zoë Strachan and Louise Welsh.
Editors’ comment:
Children can be devils, as this poem shows with tremendous clarity and sharp wit. Who hasn’t been scared of something in the attic or under the bed? But here the source of the fear creeps right up close, until it’s crouching behind the chair and worse still, in the dark corners of the mind.
Author’s note:
The story of ‘The Witches’ is true. My sister did fall off a wall. I didn’t push her. But, left behind while my parents took her to hospital, I felt as if I had. ‘Why didn’t you turn the light on?’ they asked when they returned to find me sitting in the dark. The answer – which as the older sister, expected to behave as an adult, I would have been too ashamed to give – was that I was too frightened that the witches of my dream were waiting behind my chair.
The poem was originally called ‘The Long Black Scarf’ and ended with the witches wrapping this scarf round the child’s neck – a scarf that ‘would never work loose’. I wanted it to be a symbol – rather like the albatross round the neck of the Ancient Mariner – of the way childhood trauma can survive into adulthood. It took draft after draft to realise that I was asking a simple anecdotal poem to carry too much. There was no need to invent. If, by simply sticking with the child’s experience, I could convey very complex feelings of fear, envy, jealousy, anger and guilt, without naming them, that would be achievement enough.
