baba yaga is my patron saint.

kalyna berries, aspens, birches... top photo by me, bottom photo taken by jason. riverlot, december 2010.

Last month, Sady Doyle, wrote a wonderful post about Joan of Arc on her blog Tigerbeatdown, which is fantastic, & you should read it if you don't already (that post for sure, because it's one my favourites, but all of the blog, really!) & it inspired me, because I have been thinking of Baba Yaga a lot lately, especially as a feminist icon, and an example of patriarchal structures and those who enact them use certain methods to try to bring down powerful women, & how these methods haven't really changed. & there's this bit where Sady discusses the process of picking out a Catholic confirmation name, and choosing Joan as the patron saint she'd like to have her back, which made me smile, because, yes. From what I know of this girl and her activism, it suits her perfectly.

Anyway, of course Baba Yaga in any incarnation never has & never will be canonized, but I still wish she was my patron. & so I imagine her as grandmother and protector, dispelling the myths spread to slander her, grinding the patriarchy to a pulp in that mortar & pestle.

Poem, as usual, in progress:

i)

baba yaga is my grandmother,

baking bread by morning:

she kneads her mottled heart,

offers it to the oven: all day it rises,

each pulse powering

the bellows that the bellows that set the forest

breathing, her avian hut

slowly stirring with the day.

she works, and works, arms a

a sinewy genealogy, layers of onion-skin

windowing over veins tracing paths,

remembering: a loaf for my mother,

and my mother’s mother, one for my

grandfather and another for the birds.

late afternoon, she shakes out her linens,

magpie wings as she flutters out, all

walnut-kneed and juniper-eyed,

from tree-tops she watches winter sun

soak the river fiery, turn the coals

in the dark furnace of her woods.

ii)

baba yaga is my grandmother,

even though she has no children.

those she shirked retort

that she’s just a spinster, a

dessicated pestle-pusher

but i have seen the red rider

leaving hoofprints in the yard

at dawn, & her corvid voice creaking

& lilting as she gathers herbs,

smirking:

don’t tell your mother

i’ve been teaching you bawdy songs!

iii)

baba yaga is my grandmother,

although no one believes it.

she’s not even a woman,

they scoff. village men say

she drinks the blood of livestock,

devours our children! robs

every nest, corrupts them, crazed

barren woman, bitter and unfed;

look at her fence! they cry,

(mistaking brambles for ribcages,

silver birches for weathered bones.)

they never remember

how all the women call for her,

have her cure their difficult infants,

coax them down that red-poppied

path, spin their linens, save their lives.

the men scorn, but she knows

their need, & how in times of

desperation they remember

that psha krev dog’s blood

is just a curse for a burned hand.

iv)

baba yaga is my grandmother

& also probably my great-grandmother.

those skeletons? she says,

those are my only relatives:

they said, bury me here, baba,

i will be fodder for your sunflowers,

i want asters & yarrow to blossom

from the hollows of my eyes!

baba shakes her head,

a handful of rich dark earth

in her fingers: everything we eat,

you know, is of the dead.

v)

baba yaga is my grandmother,

bright forest inside of me:

& they said she is death

but i know it’s more dangerous

to create

with a mortar with a spindle

with a sharp flint spark!

to crush harm like poppyseeds

into numb paste on your tongue –

forget the macabre lanterns,

she says, you won’t need them

in the dark:

every night she sends me off as

my own talisman,

my whole skull blazing with light.