Wry! Poem by David Lewis Paget

'Now girls, you finish your rye and milk, '
Tituba said, the slave,
The girls had clattered around the house,
'You girls, you'd better behave! '
She'd laid the table with cheese on rye,
With tumblers full of milk,
'Now eat your bread like your father said,
Or the devil will make you sick! '

The winter weather was cold that year,
The crops were brought in damp,
The miller muttered but said no more,
He ground by the midnight lamp,
The baker quibbled him over the price,
They knew that it wasn't dry,
But a wink and a nod to the Money God
Said, '...use the tainted rye! '

The girls began to suffer fits,
They'd crawl around on the floor,
They frightened Tituba the slave to bits
With the blasphemies they swore,
They screamed, began to hallucinate
Saw spectres in the air,
'It's Sarah Good in a witch's hood, '
They screamed, 'but she's not there! '

Tituba baked up a witch's cake
Then fed the cake to a dog,
It leapt and staggered and threw it up
Then lay like a drunken log,
The girls would mutter of witchlike shapes
That flew in the winter mist,
Then fell to the floor by the kitchen door,
Convulsed, in a series of fits!

Tituba, she was arrested there
Along with two likely crones,
They searched for the witch's marks on them
On the poor old women's bones,
A taste of the Reverend Parris's whip
Saw his old slave confess,
That she'd met a hog, or a giant dog
And the Devil had done the rest.

The girls convulsed, and named the names
Of a score of women there,
They'd all been seen in their fevered dreams
Or as spectres, in the air,
The Judges took no time to Judge,
But signed each new decree,
And a strange new fruit was seen to shoot
From the boughs of the gallows tree.

Even the Reverend Burroughs fell
Accused by the lips of spite,
A man of God, he had served them well,
But couldn't defend his plight,
He stood and recited the Lord, his Prayer,
Impossible for a witch,
But they strung him up, regardless then,
And buried him in a ditch!

It took the words of a four year old
To seal her mother's fate,
They fed on the word 'hysteria'
Until all they knew was hate,
And one old man who refused to plead
Was pressed to death by stones,
While down at the mill, the race ran still
As the miller ground their bones!

'It's a wry old thing, ' the miller said
As the death cart passed his mill,
And the baker stopped for a friendly pipe
By the mill-run water wheel,
'But the rye is free of ergot now
It's dry, and the wind blows free,
Swinging the last eight witches there
Under the gallows tree! '

6 November 2009