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‘Familiar Spirit’ by Sammy Weaver

20th April 202020th April 2020  Sammy Weaver

Sammy Weaver’s poem, ‘Familiar Spirit’, is a visceral and spellbinding response to Rebecca Tamás’ collection of poems, WITCH.

Written in response to Rebecca Tamás’ first full-length book of poems, WITCH (Penned in the Margins), a book I read on summer nights, in darkness, at the sides of roads whilst travelling around the UK. One night whilst reading WITCH, I heard a tawny owl calling out on the riverbank. I neared it and sat listening for hours in the dark. One familiar spirit leads to another.

FAMILIAR SPIRIT 

call it a book you look into as if it were a cauldron 

which is to say it is a deep well 

into which knotted rope is descended 

like a finger with a thick knuckle 

moving into the body’s crevice of red hot silk

call it a pyre or a pile of ashes 

and bones left at the crossroads 

for the passerby on their way to market 

to contemplate darkness

call it a song that rolls along your tongue 

call it a craft call it magic this paper 

and ink that warps and weaves lines 

to link you by gut and labia 

to the histories of semen and glossy secretions 

to the histories of screams and flame — 

O cauterised soul what man made you 

laundry in a clean-sweet-smelling bowl?

take this medicine cold girl 

little womandrake the shape 

of a baby with the beginnings of legs 

a high-pitched yelp when pulled from the dry soil 

brought many into this world

and what world heard the owl 

keeping time on the riverbank 

and the woman drawn to it like a mother 

and decided it was dangerous yes — 

love is dangerous

curing all it passes out of

luminous moon 

lunatic woman 

a red ribbon unravels out of 

a gibbous womb 

drips onto mud 

have you had enough? 

the separation of animal and spirit so long now — 

take this talisman this craft 

this cauldron this amulet 

take it to the water and look at your reflection 

false-widowed and shaking 

About Sammy Weaver

Sammy Weaver is a poet on the Creative Writing MA at Manchester Metropolitan University. Having recently moved onto a narrowboat, she is working on a series of poems for the Rochdale canal. She won the Rosamond Prize for best poetic-musical collaboration in 2019. Follow Sammy via Twitter @SammyWeaverPoem

This poem was commissioned under our new theme Night / Shift

For Night / Shift, we at Lucy Writers want to close our eyes to the rituals of the day and open them wide to the possibilities, sites, moves, sounds and forms visible only by night. Using Leonora Carrington’s work (see image above) as an entrance into this broad theme, we welcome writing – reviews, features, essays, creative non-fiction, (flash) fiction, poetry – and art work that explores night and its multiple shifts, liberating and otherwise, for womxn in particular.

Is night, as Carrington suggests, a feminine and feminist zone in itself, one which subverts daily codifications and rethinks day’s conditions? Or is night – also known as Nyx in Greek mythology, the maternal goddess of death, darkness, strife and sleep – still a period of discord, a stretch of time that threatens as much as it frees? For more information, see our Submissions & Contact page.

Feature image: Leonora Carrington’s And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur (1953), The Museum of Modern Art.

Posted in Creative Writing, PoetryTagged: Night / Shift, Poetry, Rebecca Tamás, Sammy Weaver, spells, WITCH, witchcraft

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