This poem is about Hecate, Greek Goddess of Necromancy and Witchcraft as well as various other things. She was considered to be the ‘crone’ to Persephone’s ‘maiden’. It is also drawn from my own experience of peri-menopause – that unsettling feeling of loss of oneself and of unstoppable change.

She raises the brush and pulls it through

long grey hair.  Years since it lost

claim to any other colour; now the shade

of Acherousia on a winter morning.

Looks at her younger self and

her younger self stares back

through her own eyes –

defiance bordering arrogance. 

She’s always been between

things, never fully anything.

One foot in the past –

transient, liminal. A ghost.

A crack of white light escapes

from behind thick curtains,

spotlighting parchment skin.

She can hardly recognise herself. 

The mirror whispers lies, telling

her she is old, too old for all

of this.  The crone, the witch.

Goddess of the night.  She

has been all of those things

but what is she now?

How can she know herself? 

She is not

what she once was.

How strange this is, this changing,

this unwanted shedding. A form

of grief, perhaps – of longing.

Hecate pulls back the

curtains and allows the light

to saturate her.  Holds up her hand

to the glass and looks at it. It feels

transparent but it is not. She is here.

She is here

and she is without wax. 

Her beauty is her own, inscribed

on her body; contour lines on

a map.  She is visible.

The moon, her ally, will illuminate her.

The sunlight cannot fade her.

Instead it will make her gleam,

a million pinprick reflections on her skin like sequins on a gown.