‘We Become Witches’ by Rosamund Taylor

In 1786, Caroline Herschel became the first woman to discover a comet. She discovered eight in total over a period of eleven years.

Astronomy is no better than witchcraft,
my mother said. Books frightened her.
Perhaps she’s right: only witches
would come in January to this frozen field
when the moon is a sliver and eyes burn.
I am a mole-hill of wool, featureless,
chanting star-charts to myself like a charm,
investigating mathematics instead of fine sewing
or the downy shape of a baby’s head.
A black door swings on its hinges:
my telescope unlocks the sky, I walk
in Pegasus’s wings. I don’t see witches,
no hags boiling curses, no virgins scrying
in pools of silver blood, not even here
in the stars. But it feels like sorcery
when I unstitch the sky, unpicking nebulae,
finding a white tail, and another.
I see myself, here and here: I am a comet,
my orbit long, inscrutable, easy to overlook.

From issue #6: spring/summer 2018

About the Author
Rosamund Taylor won the Mairtín Crawford Award for poetry at the Belfast Book Festival in 2017, has been twice shortlisted for the Montreal International Poetry Prize, and has been nominated for a Forward Prize for best single poem. Her work has recently appeared in Agenda, Magma, Poetry Ireland Review, Channel and on LambdaLiterary.Org.