She steeps dandelion in a chipped mug
at her kitchen table four decades after
we drank in Shakespeare and the Tate
on a semester abroad. Drink up, it’s good
for you. She dresses like a creature
of the forest to welcome Imbolg, when winter
is pregnant with summer, and in flowing red
robes on full moons. She midwifes all station
stops on the lifecycle—lullabies for birthing
mothers, ululations for the dying, and points
to her shelves of jars for ailments in any
of our eleven organ systems—would-be potions
of nettles, yarrow, feverfew. I buy all her tick
bite remedies. I think about Salem and crucibles,
how a crone alone in the woods like my friend
would end in flames or at the end of a rope. I think
of Macbeth, those wayward sisters who prophesied
trouble, the biblical There shalt not be a witch
amongst you, how my friend carries that history
of suspicion. I think about my Jewish rituals
under open sky, hands stretched toward sliver moons
to call down blessing for the new month, palm fronds,
myrtle, and willow paraded in sacred dance
each fall, incanting ancient Hebrew, eating al fresco
in fragile huts decked with branch and fruit—
but only for a week each year, the paucity of it,
I think now. I, too, show up at deathbeds and rites
for babies, coming-of-age, and legal handfasts.
But she stands closer to the pulse of the whole
broken world of it, its rhythms and disruptions,
the rose-breasted grosbeak perched on her feeder,
the bees and swallowtails she nurtures from near
extinction. She hands me a shovel to dig out Siberian
irises for my own garden, a gesture to honor
both wisdom and the Bard. Iris appears in five
of his plays, cryptic, double-edged. She bears tidings
both good and nasty from the gods, creates
both the tempest and the rainbow that follows—
arcane like we Jews, artful like us witches.