Author's note
Baba Yaga is a witch from Slavic folktale. Sometimes seen as dangerous and violent, she is also a healer and a wise woman, living in harmony with the cold, Slavic forests and often consulted for her wisdom.
This sequence attempts to imagine, and recover, her experience of nature and her relationship to human beings and their bonds of love and family. It excerpts two mini-sequences, the first, "Baba Yaga's Nativity", describing her birth and life in her forest, and the second, "Baba Yaga In Love", her memories of falling in love with a man from a nearby settlement.
Gift
What to offer him? Apples?
The branches are drenched in them.
My trees are like lakes:
fruit of the black land of this country
which Baba Yaga alone can make bright.
Let him taste them:
the cold of the sun on the ice, Siberian tenderness,
a sleigh without bells, a wolf's kiss.
Such deadly lithe wet-petalled quietness.
His heart will slip hers, like a leash.
I gather them, frost-handed, in the dawn moon.
Like coins, they glow in my basket,
the wages of husbandry:
his fruit, upon his, upon his.
Ben Morgan is a poet and academic based in Oxford, UK. His first poetry pamphlet, Medea in Corinth: Poems, Prayers, Letters, and a Curse, was published by Poetry Salzburg in 2018. It retold the famous myth through poetic letters, spells, prayers, sonnets and songs, as well as theatrical interludes. He has also published poems in Oxford Poetry and at The Sunday Tribune and The High Window. He has taught Shakespeare studies and early modern literature at a number of colleges in Oxford and is completing a monograph on Shakespeare and human rights for Princeton University Press.