A hag lives in the woods,

A woman with awl elbows.

Blind as a bat but a cannibal;

Shears flesh from the bone with

Sharks teeth, steals

Children from the villages.

When I was a kid they told me:

Don’t go into the woods –

She sets traps there, casts

Cobwebs in the branches.

She has a sister, they say;

Blind as a bat but a cannibal.

One day, a friend and I crossed

The forbidden river,

Peaked through her windowpane.

On the table she had dead rabbits, raw,

Skin peeled into buckets. We

Kept to our own side after that.