Her mother gutted fish by day
Tossed off sailors by night
So when she was conceived
In the crook of her mother's elbow
Mistaken for a canker at first
Prodded and poked to make her burst
She was thought the devil's work
Then realised as the wages of sin
Her mother was told to see the crone
Who lived alone on Whaler's Blight
The crone rolled her walleye
And said: Let the child be!
Seeming some sins are worth preserving
She was born Clara Jane Emily Worthing
And her mother carried on as before
Fish and sailors piled at her door
Clara Jane quickly grew accustomed
To the sickly stench of the sailors catch
And the sicklier stench of their semen
Blood and entrails in the morning
Groans and wadding in the evening
She would stare from their hovel on shore
Toward that point where sea and sky meet
Thinking it the most perfect of all lines
As opposed to the curving human spine
And dream of one day sailing off its edge
Falling into darkest space like a stone
Utterly lost, utterly alone
Then her mother, poor soul, up and died
Leaving fish to gut and sailors to wank
And bills to be paid on the side
So she set to work at her mother's tasks
Pulling innards of one sort or another
Wondering at what the fish gave up
And what the sailors had yet to discover
In her 26th year the pox hit like a wave
Sweeping the sailors into early graves
Until the town was no more than a coven
Of pox-ridden angry husbandless women
Woe betide us they wailed as the tide woed
Where have all our dear men gone?
Clara Jane could see the writing on the
wall
Because it was opposite her bedroom window:
Kill The Witch... it screamed
They came in the night with torches
She knew it would end this way and that
It was just...
It was just them needing...
It was just them needing her...
It was just them needing her to be...
It was just them needing her to be the
mother...
The mother of their tears
So they dragged her into the street
Beat her senseless with chains and oars
Stripped her bare, pierced her flesh
Then threw her into the sewers
At the gates head, where the sewer
breaches
Spewing filth onto the sandy beach
A plaque is attached to warn
"Here lies a cankerous elbow-bred
witch
Who was doomed before she was born"
© shaun patrick green 2015
