This text is something I've been working on for a while. Back in February I sat bolt upright in bed with an overwhelming urge to revisit the Essex Witches, it was as if they were whispering in my ear only moments before I awoke. Ultimately this chunk of text is something that will be part of a larger work but for now I am happy with this bit. Let me know what you think!
Ursula Kemp is whispering at my window again.
She started one night in late February.
She is whispering at my window.
Dark tidings.
Dark, dark tidings.
As the tide rises.
As the tide ebbs.
I see her breath upon the glass.
Chasing along the salt from the marshes.
Ursula Kemp is whispering at my window.
Standing in the shadows,
In the corners of my consciousness.
The corners of her mouth move this way and that.
Is she smiling?
Or cursing quietly under her breath?
Would she kiss her mother with that mouth.
Would she kiss a lover with that mouth.
Is it seduction or damnation?
Comfort or a quickening of disquiet?
She stands there like a stain,
In the periphery of my vision.
Persistent.
Perhaps a conjuration of my imagination.
Perhaps.
From somewhere very far off a sound is carried along the wind
The scrape and creaking of dry branches in the forest.
The scratch of the rope and the creaking of the gibbet,
Hungry for the oil of use.
It waits patiently in the late winter evening.
Sybillant sounds wash along the coastline
And up the creeks of the estuary
Though the imperceptible cracks in the windows
Where the pane meets the frame.
Ursula Kemp is whispering at my window
And her whispers wend their way in
Casting a web around the back of my mind
Catching the light in my dark room
Tiny fibres that I have to squint my attention in an effort to see.
She flickers in and out like a flame
Like cheap tallow spitting sparks into the night.
It is unclear in the dim and the dancing
In the waning of the light
If there is malice in these low
Illegible but uncompromising
Words,
Words & words
Spilling forth into the night
Ursula Kemp is whispering at my window again
And this time
She refuses to be quiet.
What kind of a woman was she. Really.
This one who seeks to be heard.
What kind of women were they all.
Have women really changed that much in all of time
Or is it just the rules that keep shifting
Treacherous sandbanks of expectation
That can sit in the same place for decades
Reappear or disappear in a day.
They can sink you,
Hide you there under the deep water,
Never to be seen or heard.
If you are not in league with the devil.
And if you don’t drown
Or swallow down all that water
But conform to the logic of your own body
They will take it up and condemn you and it for being.
For being just as you are.
Just for being.
A million ways to break you
To systematically destroy every fibre
For daring to belong to another.
To Satan
To the earth or the moon
To the old gods, the goddess
To your self.
Scatter your atoms into the sky as thick fatty smoke and ashes,
Enriching the earth before your time and in constituent parts
A scream of terror and then of pain before a void of quiet.
Juices of your well-cooked flesh soaking the earth a while,
After the fizzing of your urine as it pours forth and transforms into acrid steam.
Separating the solids from the liquids.
Sticky marks in the black soil.
Or if there is some mercy
Then some last words
Of defiance
Or forced and fearful repentance
Might just break forth from your gullet before it stretches and snaps under the weight of that body once weightless in the village pond.
Then no wonder she whispers
If her words had been clipped so short.
Now they mumble quietly as the breeze shifts my curtain,
Filtering in and out.
From outside, up in the roof,
Do they seep down from the rafters where I know there are no witch bottles set,
To trap them before I can half hear them.
Perhaps she is angry as we repeat the same mistakes,
Allowing ourselves to be bent and cowed by the same dangerous rhetorics
The illusion of control reserved for some few
At the expense of many who are not naïve enough to expect any semblance of Influence over the forces that shape their fate,
Aware that an instant is all it takes
For all of this to cease.
Perhaps she is only speaking words to herself,
Listing the things she thinks she needs so as not to forget,
Or to be forgotten.
Listing the things that she should have taken and the times she should have left.
Asking to be left well alone.
But I’m not convinced.
I think that she won’t mind too much if I poke and I pry.
I am not Him with the sneaky needle,
That tiny malicious point.
Tracing lies all over the skin.
Ursula Kemp is whispering at my window
And has been for quite some time.
She must have something important to say.
And straining in that effort to listen my mouth moves on its own,
The one I’d kiss my mother with,
The one I’d kiss a lover with,
And it attempts to make those shapes that she is asking.
Not to ape or to appropriate
But as a puppet to her story the muscles bend.
And admittedly I speak in a half understanding
The years and the years and the layers of soil between us.
My modern lips only able to work within their own muscle memory
Confined by the context in which they are grown.
But I cannot be shamed by this.
It speaks of the brave and powerful ones who came before me,
That I can utter her name without fear of rebuke.
And each time I do she lives a little more.
Albeit in a modern skin.
Where a mole is just a mole
And the only malignancy it might hold is the over production of cells,
And if you catch it early that kind of cancer can be cut away.
Buy you some more of your time,
No deal with the devil required.
And the only familiars are our mobile phones
Which cast a far more powerful spell than any demon
Or human being might.
The marks of these technological succubi are yet to be seen
Perhaps nestled deep inside.
Their magic so persuasive that
We happily ignore any desire to seek
The damage they may send our bodies
While we use them to hook up to a world of people sat individually, Communicating all over the globe.
But increasingly only to like-minds that reinforce their own perceptions
Rather than growing them rich and vibrant through challenge.
Ursula Kemp is muttering muttering,
Slightly louder through the Essex night,
Before She fades in the light of the same sun.
That centuries back would have baked her dangling corpse,
Fluid settling in in her fingers like swollen samphire.
Or dried out the flesh of her head as it perched in plain view.
Set there as a warning
Ignored by the carrion birds picking at her brain.
But perhaps if I tilt my head I can see her
Begin to move back through the daylight too.
She seeks me because of my curiosity
Follows in the hope that she might find
Some chink through which to take possession
The porosity of a mind given to enquire and seek stories
For understanding how best to move through the process of this life.
Ursula Kemp is whispering at my window again,
And some day soon
She will roar.