My friend Mark and I visit his mom.
Her thatched hut, low and long,
hunkers on a traffic-isle, a dais
whose oval lip looms
three feet above the pave.
Her initiates sleep on the edge.
For Mom is a witch-smeller--
No shaman herself, but rather
a cunning old judge of whether
young dreamers will go to the bad.
Her own grandson, in his teens,
sleeps in a bag on the edge tonight.
If he dreams wrong, if she deems
him gone bad, she'll cut his throat.
Smoggy salmon dawn. I tiptoe
to the lip and whisper:
"What did you dream?" "I dunno.
I think I was scaly, long and low.
Not a snake I think, because my
tail was taller than wide, and slid
me through water. Was I an eel?
Yet I had no fins at all..."
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Witch-Smeller looms with a foot-long knife
Overheard snake, and that's enough.
A lost moan, long and low.
She says "Leave. This I do alone:
the hardest thing a mother's called to do--
kill a serpent-son."
My sister Miriel stands breast to knife!
"No, you won't. You're wrong. You
see Satan-snakes in every dream,
but I've sat in shamanic cafes,
and other teachers all over town
treat reptile-dreams a dozen ways!
You leave him alone." And she won't budge
from the knifepoint of the murderous judge.
Witch-Smeller rants, long and low;
pokes but doesn't plunge her knife.
In the end, Miriel Mark and I
spirit him off: no fight.
A few years later I visit. He's fine.
A croc is his dreamguide animal
but he has a mammalian mind--
a kind young healer, that's all.
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