[Poem] If It Please

If It Please

There was a Witch a-witchin’ once
Inside the forest deep.
She wove a roof of thatchéd leaves
In seams of which the raindrops creeped
And wet her fingers when she’d sleep
Inside the forest deep.

This Witch, she had a cauldron fire
That never did grow damp or dim
And over that a blackened pot–
The bottom never once was saw–
And into this she’d toss and stew
The things she plucked to do for you,
To do for me, to do for those
Who came to tell her of their woes
Inside the forest deep.

And once this Witch, to do a thing,
She caught a wasp that had a sting,
A bat that drank of bitter blood,
A fish that no man else had seen
With scales rainbow glittering,
A newt that heard a lover’s moan
Under a tree that weren’t her own,
A honeysuckle flower stem,
A quill that would have been a pen.
She gathered these and tied them fast
And them into her pot she cast
And thought a thought so loud and slow
That Mother heard her down below.

And by an art that man has lost,
She stewed and thought and gripped and sang,
And atoms many miles away,
They heard and moved and leapt and sprang,
And Mother heeded her request
So humbly and with manners made
And let the things she gently asked
Become to be and so be laid.

And for a sake that weren’t her own
The Witch a-witching down the way
Unmade a thing that might have been
And gave another back the day.
This thing she does, and many more
For all a-knocking at her door,
And never for a price too steep
Inside the forest deep.