The One-Eyed Witch Poem by David Lewis Paget

Lavern lived down in the valley
Away from the village folk,
She didn't want to be seen by them
Playing with eggs and yolk,
And skin of frog, an old dead dog
A toad and the eye of newt,
She only conjured them in the fog
When dressed in her birthday suit.

But I would see her abroad in the woods
From up in the old oak tree,
She flitted naked under a hood
Albeit most carelessly,
She liked to gather her toadstools there
And take her favourite bat,
Clinging onto her long, dark hair
And follow her magical cat.

The mushrooms grown in a Faery Ring
Were an ever present danger,
For goblins gathered them all themselves
For a goblin baby's manger,
She'd lost an eye in a goblin pie
When he reached on out and plucked it,
She got it back, but the dwarf was sly
In the sauce she'd used, he'd ducked it!

I didn't mind that she'd got one eye
For her thighs were well developed,
I thought I'd marry her, by and by,
Then she went with Rodney Mellop,
I wandered up to her window-sill
When I heard his sighs and moans,
I thought they must have been making love,
She was hanging up his bones.

I must admit that it calmed me down,
That it put a damper on it,
I'd watched him lie in her pot and drown
As she danced in a pretty bonnet,
His bones she pulled from the boiling stew
And made wind chimes from his femurs,
At night they sound like a xylophone
In a madhouse full of dreamers.

29 November 2016