My child, I blessed you with beauty,
your mother’s first gift.
By then we were old and wrinkled
already, knew nothing than to toil and trouble
in curses of men.
I thought beauty could save you.
So we spun a childhood like an arras, deep in a forest
of sweet soil and honeyed Flora, slumbered
in snow-white lies
and the lack of a spindle.
Be it witch or fairy,
whatever but women that they called us.
The Fates had another wheel prepared, they do
and not even the gods could alter.
It is eternal beauty that I see in your eternal sleep.
Beauty that I forged myself.
Beauty that became your epithet.
So tell me, my child,
when you walked into that light, did you dream of me?
My child. I gave you a voice, deep and charming,
for I wanted you to spend your waking hours singing
instead of screaming. Their cries
web the forest. Our sisters’ daughters,
too young to be mothers, too faux to be wives and
too real to be women. They fall in gusts,
in dusts, crawl in the fingernails of the Fauna,
roar at the tips of our wands.
We, the lucky ones,
have strayed away from a far more gruesome story.
Yet the spindle has a quiet art. She, sister too,
spun it, and her sister, sister too, sized it—
a tiny string of fate.
Which, princess or witch?
One grows old, roams in a house which once had a child,
holds the hands of her sisters. The other sleeps in youth
forever. In this fairytale, you barely talk.
Your only song
ended in a man’s strange promise and a dream
told by a chorus.
My child, what is this dream I have bestowed upon you?
What is this wish?
My sisters have told me about the sister whose scissors
put an end to all pulses, red or blue.
I took away her blades, for a bit, but not the prick
of her needle.
Did you tell the Erinyes,
in the throat of the hell-hound, your fury? Fury of my sisters
and me? Did you spit venom out of your veins and curse
the king, the court, the old wives’ games?
I never wanted you to be brave. I wanted you happy.
My mother, too, thought so for me.
Merryweather, she named me.
And so did the old wives for their babies and their babies’
babies. They carry until they freeze, sleep
in pierced fingers of beauties, buried in layers of dreams
like blankets of snow. Until all has forgotten—
before I wanted you to grow old,
I wanted you happy.
