In the
Witch Museum
Simon
MacCulloch
A rainy English holiday, attractions few and far
Down dripping country lanes whose leafage saturates the eye
The windscreen wipers’ glassy squeak within the hissing
car
The only measure of the minutes slowly trickling by.
The map suggests a place of interest, any place will do
Which boasts a roof and colours to disrupt the running
green
And thus the sky and soil conspire, uncaring why or who
To show another hapless soul the things best left unseen.
The roof is low, the ceiling damp, the walls and floor
untrusty
Exhibits scarcely better kept within their mouldy cases
For those of cloth are moth-eaten and those of metal rusty
And some are merely labels guarding insect-graveyard
spaces.
All that, perhaps, a setting fit to prompt a sense of
history
But garish signs forbidding smoking scarcely help that
cause
And what we glean from nooks of mildewed shadow is a
mystery
That hardly seems significant enough to make us pause.
And then, a spindly claw of iron whose label states with
relish
“For tearing flesh, when heated red” - of witches,
we
suppose
And thumbscrews, torture boots and more are present to
embellish
This chapter in a local tale of self-inflicted woes.
No magic spark or glint of gothic glamour in the gloom
A weary sense of old mistakes made crime through repetition
And lingering like a stagnant smell to taint each ill-lit
room
The clinging foggy remnants of a bygone superstition.
A superstition? Maybe not - it savours of excuses
A lazy tissue of deceit which barely serves to hide
The endless search for scapegoats onto whom to heap abuses
To purge us of the poison that we cannot hold inside.
So now I understand their purpose, all those vacant niches
They’re ready for the relics of another century’s
rape
And I will not return to the museum of the witches
For I have never left it, and I fear there’s no escape.
