Esbat
A Wiccan ritual for the full moon

Dark fall, leaf fall, sweet
shuffled
sound
at the gravelled mouth
of the driveway where
on Poplar Place’s

root-broken pavement loom
my mother, loom
her mother,
tall tweed loom
next to me, both over me,
and Harvest She.

Hangs silent.
Over.
The big chestnut tree.

“Look,”

“Look,”

stagger their voices

“Look”
three words
and it is the chain of women
almost-legal
in that quiet
bestowal, three
long
and tender
as if many women
are speaking
“Look!—The Moon!"

and in the vowelled
silence i
held
to the raw raw
raw (small warm fingers)
held to the raw end
raw (five years old)
end of the chain

held
and knew
it was the lifeline,
i knew
it was the blood.

i didn’t know
yet it was
the first
poem

I
remember.

Artist’s Statement

With hindsight, a number of my poems qualify as “turning points.” In “First Poem” (1977), discussed in the essay “Coherent Decentering,” I began to write on a more psychically dynamic level. “A Room at Night” (1982) sampled metrical diversity for the first time, and “Time for Endymion” (1986), the first of what I call my “Lost Poems,” explored disjunctive syntax within meter. “Landing Under Water” (1993) claimed a place in the female lyric tradition, and “Winter Solstice Chant” (1994) was the first poem I wrote for a public pagan ritual. Each of these poems initiated a tendency that is still central to my work. A more recent turning point, which intrigues me in part because it is still not clear where its tendency will lead, is “Esbat,” written in 2004.

I wrote “Esbat” in a different way than other poems I’ve written. Normally, poems force themselves on me through a kind of rhythmical intrusion of language into my consciousness: a metrical pattern, a line, several lines, or even a whole poem, as described in the essay “Dedication.” Perhaps because my poems arrive in such an internal way, they often don’t contain much exterior information about who, when, where, and how. There is only the what, which is the poem. So my lyric poems tend to be quite purely lyrical. On the other hand, my narrative poems, such as “Catching the Mermother” or a series-in-progress recounting tales of goddesses, are quite purely narrative.

“Esbat” is neither and both. I wrote it as I was finishing the third in a trilogy of books based on the triple goddess (the maiden, mother, and crone groupings ubiquitous in mythology). Currently titled American Witch, it is the crone book, following on the maiden book Eve and the mother book Calendars. Each of the books in this trilogy incorporates some early poems written long before the manuscript was assembled. For American Witch, I felt I needed a recent poem that would spiral far back to childhood, connecting present with past—and it had to be about the moon.

A particular incident in my life, which I had written about in an unpublished memoir-in-progress, seemed the inevitable subject for this poem, and I used that lyric prose essay as the basis for “Esbat.” The poem had its origin, literally, as “cut-up prose,” that longstanding butt of formalist derision. It’s been many drafts since then, but the poem stays quite close in conception, imagery, and language to the original prose passage.

What strikes me as significant about “Esbat” is that it’s the first truly autobiographical lyric I’ve written—by which I mean that it provides a full set of external details of setting, action, and character along with its subjective lyric experience. (The closest I’d come earlier to this mode—which is, of course, by far the predominant mode in current American poetry—were a few earlier poems, such as “Inside the Violet” (1995), that used external settings for internal narratives). This new (to me) autobiographical approach was liberating in many ways. It freed me from devotion to my internal muse, providing a more distant perspective within the poem and allowing me to tell a real-world story

“Esbat” is my coming-out poem as a pagan. While Eve and Calendars include poems about goddesses and chants for earth rituals, nothing there indicates that these subjects are more than literary devices. The character in “Esbat” is a public, stylized version of myself. That “Esbat” is about growing up to be a witch provides a built-in, quasi-allegorical distance; I am still not used to writing about myself directly and doubt that I could have written such an autobiographical poem without that narrative distance. “Esbat” opens the door for me to write about my life more directly by putting myself—or at least the pagan part of myself—into my poems as a character. Though it’s too soon to say where this path will lead, I’m glad to know where the doorway is.