(poems written about me going from a Stoic to a Drama Queen, thus Chicken Little or Henny Penny)
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Walking through my next-door swamp
One cloudy noon
A small structure never seen
Appears in the gloom
Wood, blending in with the Live Oaks
But there’s a door
And a hose-like shower
A ‘Bania’? Bathhouse?
The Slavic DNA in me
Tingles
And I remember Gran’s stories
About meeting fairies and yes,
Demons to beware
In the Bathhouse at Midnight
So no, not adventurous enough
To do a midnight romp
But now the gloom gives way
And it is midday
Twelve hours before magical time
Looking at the sky
Sun bright and high
Twelve post meridiem
No shadows to see
Why engage in word play
It’s my eclectic bent
New magical way
What will happen, I wonder
If I enter this bathhouse at
Midday?
This is the threshold
To the other world
I recall
Moving toward the hose
I trip and fall
And my eyes close for a moment
Suddenly a little old man appears
The ‘Bannik’
I greet him respectfully
Give him a gift of coins dowsed
With the almost-finest vodka
And ask him to help me with
Continued health
“Do you need protection from the
‘Triasavitsy’
Herod’s Daughters number twelve
Each fever demon is
Responsible for a different illness
Is it measles? Small pox?”
More like Covid19 says I
And he, a quasi-divinity
Peers at me from another
Century
People then fought diseases now under control
“Do you have the faceless dolls of
Herod’s Daughters?
If not, bake 12 pies and leave them at the
Crossroads
MIDNIGHT! Do this at MIDNIGHT!”
Shouts he
And I open my eyes
Blinking at the empty ‘Bania’
Standing up shakily
And, I confess, getting the hell out of there
Back to my safe haven
Of dogs and plastic flamingos
Resin statues and even Roomie
Cutting the grass
While the cardinals call each other
And sanity
Such as it is
Reigns…
++++++++++
© 2022 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)
IMAGE: Herod’s Daughters, St. Petersburg Ethnographic Museum
There is peppery cayenne
Rich, red, and stinging
Think of all the dusty protection it’s bringing
Keeping my beloved dogs from
Crawling under the porch mat
Keeping sharp-toothed possums
From establishing habitats
Then there is Sangre de Drago dust
Magical healer when a paste
Healing skin sun-debased
But when a fiery, resinous smoke so dense
Lit, as if, an aromatic incense
No demons dare cross our threshold
Russian folktales have us enter
The mysterious bathhouse at midnight
To meet the magical water sprite
Sprinkling powdered flower dust
To ease us through the fear and mistrust
Dust
Dust
A phenomenon to displease
We sure do tend to sneeze and wheeze
It brings unease yet to clean it is a breeze
When we show our expertise
With dust that will appease
Our daily needs…
xoxoxo
© 2022 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)
IMAGE: Magic Healing Dust
I want to find a
Seventy-year-old
Springsteen
And strap my hands
‘Cross his engines
Because baby I’m old but
Still dying to run
O, so old now
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But nothing’s changed
‘Cept a lot more aches and pains
Ready for the next trip
But not Charon’s ferry
To the underworld
Ready
Ready for what?
Can’t explain the compulsion
To run
In the direction of the
Setting sun
April-born should love the East
Where sun signals beginnings
But hey, I’m not the black sheep
I’m the ram of Aries
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Virginia Woolfe wrote
If Shakespeare had a sister
She could not
As did he
Run away to write
Play after play
She’d have to worry about
Rape and pregnancy
Women are not free
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So I’ll speed away
In my mind only
And I’ll bet you’ll see
That longing in our
Species’ eye
To solve the mystery
Before we die…
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© 2022 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)
IMAGE: Baba Jaga flying away
Reading tarot cards
For a friend
Rare, nowadays
But the question was
“I fantasize using
A celebrity
But eventually
Believe it and
Expect it to be real
It’s devastating
Because I fear
It will never be
And how can I live
Without him being
A flesh and blood
Part of me?”
I lay out the cards
And I see
A chaos of symbols
Sometimes
In my experience
We must consider
Psychology
And I say,
“Think of him as your
Avatar
Who looks like the
Famous star
Who acts like the
Famous star
But you can mold him
Exactly as you want
In your fantasies”
She gives me this look
And I know
All along she believed
I’d predict what she wanted
Conceived
But I could not say
He will be yours any day
It just wasn’t in the cards…
<> <> <>
© 2022 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)
IMAGE: fantasy tarot reading
poeturja 