The Witching Hour

 

 

 

 

  

Her Kind

 

by Anne Sexton

via 1

 

 

I have gone out, a possessed witch,

haunting the black air, braver at night;

dreaming evil, I have done my hitch

 

over the plain houses, light by light:

 lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.

 A woman like that is not a woman, quite.

 I have been her kind.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have found the warm caves in the woods,  

 

filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,  

 

closets, silks, innumerable goods;

 

fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:

 

whining, rearranging the disaligned.

 

A woman like that is misunderstood.

 

I have been her kind.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have ridden in your cart, driver,

 

waved my nude arms at villages going by,

 

learning the last bright routes, survivor

 

where your flames still bite my thigh

 

and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.

 

A woman like that is not ashamed to die.

 

I have been her kind.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Outfit:

Black dress: Nicole Farhi warehouse sale

 

Black spanish lace: passed down from late granny Kiki

 Black suede court shoes: bought many years ago from Hobbs

 Isis pendant: from a car boot sale

 

 

The Soundtrack

Dead Will Dance: Into The Labyrinth

All photographs taken of myself and my beautiful Mum by Mr Eve, using my little digital camera.

 

 

 

As I've been too busy to take outfit photos or blog this week, I thought I'd share some photographs, for those of you who haven't seen them before, from a post first published last year at my other blog Idle Bakes in celebration of Halloween. I've always wondered, why only show a witchy post in the autumn? After all, "witches" lived all year long. No doubt if I had been born in the 1500s I could've been called a witch, as so many unconventional women such as ourselves were in those days, and burned at the stake for no good reason. Witches were nothing like the modern stereotype of cruel carbuncled hags, they were ordinary people, young and old, who were scapegoated for not "fitting in" or for being poor, and blamed for everything from the bad crops to a death in the village.

I'd like to think that those days have passed, but the present conservative government's victimisation of the disabled and the most vulnerable in our society shows a remarkable similarity to the witch hunts of the burning times: nowadays people are left to die through extreme poverty and neglect instead of being burned alive.

 

I'm delighted to be a part of Visible Monday, hosted by the lovely Patti from www.notdeadyetstyle.blogspot.co.uk, click on the website link to see her outfit and those of many others.