A’Yara Stein, born in Memphis TN and currently living near Chicago on a chicory farm with her husband and sons, is a Romani-American poet. She holds an MFA from the University of Arkansas and is a grant recipient of the Michigan Art Council and the Arkansas Arts Council. Her work has appeared in publications such as America, The New Orleans Review, The Birmingham Poetry Review, California Quarterly,Chiron Review, and Crossroads: A Journal of Southern Culture. Her take on a classic is contemporary and bracing. Didn’t you always wonder how those kids could just start tearing at the house like that, with no admonitions against destruction of property sounding through their minds? They might as well have been raised by wolves … wait, that’s a different story.
Careful Who You Trust
By A’Yara Stein
A pocketful of pure white stones, a path:
Survival encourages subversion,
Tells children to eavesdrop on their parents,
To trespass, steal property, commit murder.
They lose track of time and soon they are lost.
Faced with famine, they depend on slim crumbs;
Ration what was already too little to save.
In dark reality they try to find their way.
Failing this, no fewer than fourteen angels
Watch over them as they sleep; Gretel weeps.
By noon they slip tongues between sweet bricks
If they wonder who lives in a house like this
They don’t let it show and go on eating.
Gretel pushes out a sugared window-pane;
Hansel tears down big shingles of sheet cake;
His dirty little fingers squirm in pink icing.
The witch, an excellent cook, serves the children
Apple pancakes and tender, bloody meat.
All three believe they’ve found their fortune.
Now Hansel is growing fat in his cage.
Gretel carries water, does what she is told.
At bitter cost she watches and learns
Too late the message not to trust
The seeming generosity of strangers.
The moral to the story might not be moral:
They play at the game of eat or be eaten.
Gretel’s chicken bone, ingenuity of youth.
Here Hansel and Gretel will come of age.
They burn the cannibal witch, steal her jewels
For their father, how easily they forgive.
If I could refer here I’d post my hansel and gretel poem! great reworking of the story 🙂
This is an amazing retelling. “Survival encourages subversion.” I think I’ll use it in daily conversations.