Wicked Witch Poem by Herbert Nehrlich

She flew into a rage, red-faced,
and yelled 'Oh Hansel, will you take it out!
It is no more a matter of your finger,
and times of innocence have well and truly passed.'

But Gretel, who was standing guard behind the tree,
now, overwhelmed by what she saw, she closed her eyes.
Re-writing history, she thought, would it suffice
to have events stashed into memory's remotest regions.
Or was there an entitlement for all to know this truth?

The teller of the story had been shackled
by decency and spiderweb convention.
What really happened must now be imagined,
the moral being that an object, pointing
through iron bars to be assessed
for size and functionality,
may well appear to be what it is not.
And have you wondered why
they call her 'wicked witch'?