It was a witch’s toy,
that’s what they said.
She made it, they said,
and so everything that happened must have been her doing.

Some people said it was made of darkness and old clothes.
Some said the wind whistled through it.
Some said it had old dry bones in it,
some said they were human bones.

She not being a witch, so she said,
it was no witch’s toy, whatever it was.
She had seen her son playing with just such a toy,
that’s the reason she made it, she said.

He was playing with it as he ran and laughed
between the green grass
and the blue, blue, blue sky
—oh, it was so blue!

That was how it was, she said,
after he died
and she danced and danced.
That was what she saw, she said, just before the vision

ended like a snapped-off twig

Image: The Human Heart has Hidden Treasures, by Michelle Robinson, published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) license.