One Poem by Susan Jordan

 

Hagge 

 

Cailleach Bheur, blue-skinned giant

Faery goddess-mother, she presides

Over the burial mounds, the wilderness

The life force of our planet, she stirs

Her cauldron of wisdom, midwife & healer

Protects children, young animals

The deer are her cattle, first diety

Of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers

Millennia later Welsh poets sang

Of three hags bearing tridents

Who guard wild beasts & the sacred wells

 

In the Seelie Women’s Season

The Hagge strikes the earth with Her distaff

& calls down the snow, in the springtime

She throws down the distaff, turns into

A Stone of the Circle

Or the Maiden herself

The life force returns, then

the patriarchs turn the spiral of seasons

Into a straight line from Creation

To Judgment, the Hagge is judged evil

Her blessings now curses

A witch to be burned

Susan Jordan (born 1947) edited The Empty Closet, an LGBTQ newspaper, in Rochester, NY, for 28 years (1989-2017). Susan self-published a chapbook, Crystal Spirit in the 1970s, and has published in magazines including Sailing the Road Clear, and more recently in OutWrite, the literary journal of ImageOut Film Festival in Rochester. In 1972, Susan assisted George Butterick in cataloguing the Charles Olson papers at U. of Connecticut.