Nice choice, as usual, Hal, this time from Alison's poetry. Here's a
different kind of magic, Afro-Cuban witchery, by Soleida Rios. I've been
struggling to get it right for about a week.
The Witch’s Bird
The bird was born of a machete’s blade
It is unlike mockingbird
blackbird or dove--
it was born of a machete’s blade
not from an old bird’s white egg.
Neither skylark nor quetzal
nor the buzzard that anxiously tracks last footsteps,
it lives in the Witch’s song. It makes its nest there,
and it sings like the birds of sea and wasteland.
It scatters the mules. Implacable, in foul weather
it flies above a hut’s palm thatch
and someone must surely die.
From March to October it’s all the bird’s fault:
if lightning strikes the midst of a palm tree
if the river floods
if a verse comes infinitely slowly
bearing the aroma of the last of the coffee
in every case–from March to October–
it’s the bird’s fault.
2
They say that once a couple of friends
found themselves in the night
near the Witch's song, where they had gathered
for a bout of magic,
and that they brought forth the enormous urn
of amulets and bones that had been till then
the secret they held
in trust for the believers.
They say that something came among them
in that place where the code of men
is broken; but no one really knows.
They say that machetes were drawn.
3
The bird was born on the last violent rung
of the heart hidden deep within the breast.
No one can see it
though it has flown over all the heights
of all the mountains.
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