Old Witch
       

The three- year-old looks up at me with puzzlement
and guarded fear and won't come too close.

It's the way my eyes are drinking in her being,
enjoying the contours of her little body, pert round

face. And suddenly, I feel in me myself at that age
frightened of a wizened grandmother who must have

held that voracious look as she delighted in
my presence, hungered for my newness with such

intensity— I did not like it, did not want to be
around her. I called her a witch; it was because

she wanted to eat me, that if I stayed pinned
to her eyes, she would lick me right off the bone.

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Copyright © 2016 Natalie Safir All rights reserved
from Eyewitness
Dos Madres Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission