“What power art thou/Who from below
Hast made me rise/Unwilling and slow….”
–John Dryden, libretto “The Cold Song”
for Henry Purcell’s King Arthur
How complicated, incest.
A boy hates and loves his little sister.
Mother torn away, father silent,
grandmother a sharp old German hand
bitter in her blue bedroom.
What does he know of fairy tales
and the Frost King buried in earth?
Yet years and years upon dark
years later he kills himself
one winter night and the woman
who has tried to forgive takes
his ashes to a garden. How
can she believe what she hears
through still air as she wakes alone?
No one else’s voice but his.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 26, Issue 4.
Katharyn Howd Machan grew up in Woodbury, CT, a 1950s childhood. Since 1975 she has lived in Ithaca, NY, as a Writing professor at Ithaca College, with a stint at Northwestern University for a doctorate in the performance of literature. She has taught belly dancing on the island of Skyros, Greece, in the Aegean, an island of her heart which she has visited ten times. Her most recent published collections are A Slow Bottle of Wine (Comstock Writers, Inc.) and Dark Side of the Spoon (The Moonstone Press).
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