A Dream Begins
Susan Butler
A dream begins with a young girl who thinks herself a witch,
with moonlit nights and explorations of bright possibilities,
a sounding of futures so as to plumb the brightest one and shy from the misstep.
She made you charms
while you stole away her voice and her choices.
She held still when you sliced your words across her skin.
She kept smiling when you hung her
because you were all she loved, all she knew.
She raided the past for that one small thing she missed, a change in the air, a faltering, a
feather,
for any card unturned or omen glimpsed yet unheeded,
for the chance to say: Freeze. There, that. That is what I did not see. That is where I
mistook,
where I took
the wrong path, where I
failed.
But that was long ago and now the bones of distant music poke through her threadbare
old skin.
The eyes of a thousand birds peer from the weeds of her hair.
The sobs of sorry bees echo beneath her frail mask and she wanders toward the sea with
blind eyes.
Or she is simply the witch you burned.
And then it ends.
But the sweetest words are a dream begins.