Carol Ann Bond- Swamp Witch
drawing by Chad Verrill
Our Fresh Local Lit series serves up poems and prose by Philadelphians twice a week. Today’s author, poet Carol Ann Bond, shares a poem about a haunting creature whose fate traps her in a swamp.
Your poem “Swamp Witch” describes an eerie woman who wants “until it is a bloody thorn in her heart.” What is it that she wants? Why is she doomed to this loathsome existence?
She is not a woman but a creature and it is her fate to wander the swamp alone. Some people go through their lives alone. She is a figment of my imagination. I just dreamed her up. Something like a banshee. She is a witch as the poem states and the most important thing which I want to convey is her anguish, never having love. I work on visual and visceral energy and I believe there are people in life who do not have love.
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What book or poem made you realize you wanted to be a poet?
I realized I wanted to write when my life did not work out to my satisfaction. My two other books are prose, Catfish Joe & Double, Double, Toil & Trouble, (comedy) and La Gitana (drama). My life made me want to write. As they say, “Have It Your Way”..There is no logical explanation for the poem. It is passion in its truest essence. Anais Nin, E.A Poe, & Flannery O’Connor are my literary influences.
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If you could give a reading anywhere in the world, at any time in history, where and when would it be and why?
If I had to read, I would hope it would be @ Robins @ 13th & Sansom.
Swamp Witch
Nude and forlorn, clothed in vines and leaves,
Moss green hair and yellow eyes
Like the golden changeling moon,
She roams the swamp as lonely as a star,
Hurtling through time and space.
Never seen, never loved, never cherished.
Bitter as arsenic.
Wanting, wanting, wanting,
Until it is a bloody thorn in her heart.
And the wind screeches like a banshee as it flows through her mossy hair.
And the juices of sulfuric hell flow through her veins.
Know her by the blood caked on her naked breasts,
And her quick lizard step and the smell of rot,
Which is her own particular magnificence.
CAROL ANN, according to rumor was raised by wolves. This is not true. Her parents, Alec, and Jerylyn, encouraged her early forays into the visual arts, and for a time in the eighties, she was a free-lance fashion photographer. Having found out that Praise is not Legal Tender, she later worked various wage-slave jobs such as painting the eyelashes on Barbie Dolls. Upon retirement, she began her writing career and published two books, Catfish Joe & Double, Double Toil & Trouble and Poems of Thunder (Noir & Whimsy). She is the main writer and creator of the Blog, societyfordaintydamsels.wordpress.com. She is also the writer of La Gitana, about Carmen Caballito, a Machiavelle and sociopath, and ruthless survivor who will stop at nothing. Murderer, poisoner, lover of men and women, ruler of nations, She is all these things, She has a degree in English and anthropology which generally was as beneficial as having a bullet in the head. She will continue to write until something wonderful happens such as The Second Coming of Christ.
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