My Previous Life as a Witch

When the king's men

killed my husband

I went back

to the cottage

far in the forest

took my black cat

George

the tortoiseshell

Isis

what I could carry

on my back

left towns & cities,

company of others

behind

threw it all

over for

blankets of moss and leaves

wildflower perfume

walls of oak and vine

meadow windows

onto ceilings

of stars

gathered weeds for food

bathed in sacred springs

learned the cries of crows,

the courses of rivers

heard the earth speaking

watched the year wheel

beneath the Seven Sisters

while sun and moon

spun storms, breezes,

summer's hazy heat

and clarity of autumn,

crystalline

learned the herbs

and how to use them

how to kill and

how to heal

midwifed the birthing

and the dying—

human and animal,

flower and tree

alone

worked magic under full moons

and dreamed the future in the dark

danced the summer in

through fires at Bealtaine

called the dead

at Hallowe'en

finally

came to see it all

as cosmic holy pulse—

how shapes, like universes,

shift and dance through time

came to see

even "time"

as fallacy

past

present

future

animal

vegetable

mineral

all the same

connected

sacred

shapeshifting

towards enlightenment

under whirling stars

vowed

to come back

again

to help

-by A Word Witch

copyright c. 1996

**

I'm not much into past lives; though I believe we have all lived them, I think what's more important is what we do right here, right now. However, I was gifted with this poem back in the 1990s. It came from somewhere, not sure where. I count it as the one clear vision of a past life that I've ever had. Waverly Fitzgerald, then-editor of The Beltane Papers, kindly agreed to publish it in issue #11, Samhain 1996.