O Ye, All Ye That Walk in Willowwood, by Magin LaSov Gregg

O Ye, All Ye That Walk in Willowwood, by Margaret MacDonald Mackintosh (Scotland) 1903

O Ye, All Ye That Walk in Willowwood
 
Three women gather around a well. 
They look like they are made of smoke.
They look like they are disappearing.
Light drains from their eyes. 
 
Beaded ropes swing down 
from their hair, pliant 
as willow boughs. 
 
Oh, willow, willow, Desdemona
sings before her lover smothers
her. Oh, willow willow, 
for the tree that’s lost its lover
and so has lost its way.
 
Careful, careful,
the women seem to say. 
You might vanish too. 
 
The artist chose a witchy 
green palette
for her water. 
She makes her women captives.
She makes a spell of longing. 
 
I used to think the women lonely.
I used to think loss might drown me. 
 
Only today, I saw them as a coven,
not bereft, nor dangerous, but bound 
by the magic that holds 
this cracked-up world together. 
 
Some people call it love. 
Some people call it holy. 
  
Magin LaSov Gregg
 
Magin LaSov Gregg lives in a slightly haunted house in Frederick, Maryland. She’s an emerging poet and finds great joy in Tiferet Journal’s spiritual poetry workshops, where this ekphrastic work began. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, National Public Radio, and the dearly departed Gettysburg Review. Her memoir-in-essays An Altar in My Heart is an Autumn House Press two-time Nonfiction Book Prize Finalist. Magin enjoys singing and dancing with her young son, making their garden bloom, and immersing herself in the artwork of Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh.