Gretel in Darkness

This is the world we wanted. All who would have seen us dead are dead. I hear the witch's cry break in the moonlight through a sheet of sugar: God rewards. Her tongue shrivels into gas . . .

Now, far from women's arms and memory of women, in our father's hut we sleep, are never hungry. Why do I not forget? My father bars the door, bars harm from this house, and it is years.

No one remembers. Even you, my brother, summer afternoons you look at me as though you meant to leave, as though it never happened. But I killed for you. I see armed firs, the spires of that gleaming kiln--

Nights I turn to you to hold me but you are not there. Am I alone? Spies hiss in the stillness, Hansel, we are there still and it is real, real, that black forest and the fire in earnest.

Whatever became of poor Gretel...

by Louise Gluck