(c) 3/4/2022
All parts of
the Yew tree are poisonous.
Tea steeped
from the leaves easily makes
a small
child sick. Placed in wise womanly hands
Yew heals swollen
tonsils, inflamed joints,
and aborts. Some
believe the trunk
of the
church-yard Yew contains purifying properties,
like a
baptismal font, or a polished coffin lined with silk.
Say, like how
a devil serves as a psychopomp to heaven.
Townsmen choose
Yew wood as cask barrel staves
to aid in rotting
grapes, and often as rods
to bludgeon
the stranger for the sin
of being a
stranger, never forgiven
but often
forgotten until consequences caught up.
Rods hewn
from Yew trees offer balance
to the
crippled witch.
Quicker to
hide her trade than to heal
the wife gathers
twigs for her broom
from the
hardy Hackberry tree, the beaverwood,
the
sugarberry, the nettle tree.
Sometimes
the branch’s wart-like
protuberances
transfer
to her knuckles.
A host
to butterfly larva, the flowers
are
often perfect and the townsmen think
the tree
is merely ornamental.
Yew rods
have been cut to hold up the climbing vine,
to frame a
window; to offer the magician
a wooden
bridge between her hand,
earth, and
the sky.
Everything
depends on what is cut, or whether
it is ever
picked up.
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