My sister and I go visit the Crone.
Her thatched home, low and long,
broods on an oval traffic-isle.
That gray Roraima rears a full
yard above pave. On the concrete
lip the Crone's initiates sleep.
For Crone is a witch-smeller--
No shaman herself, but rather
a Damoclean judge of whether
young dreamers will go to the bad.
Her own grandson, in his teens,
dreams in a bag on the edge tonight.
If he nightmares, if she deems
him malsouled, she'll slit his veins.
Smoggy salmon dawn-glow.
I tiptoe to the lip to whisper:
"What did you dream, kid?" "I dunno.
I think I was scaly, long and low.
Not a snake, because my tail
was taller than wide and slid
me through water. Was I an eel?
Yet I had armored skin..."
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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
seek Satan-snakes in every dream,
but I've sat in shamanic cafes,
And other Crones 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, she lets us go.
We 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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