Witch Welfare

It’s cute

when make-believe revolutions learn choreography,

masquerading as papier-mâché conviction,

trading outrage for manifestos,

sickles drawn in rhetoric,

arson performed in syntax,

building enemies from straw

only to stage their dismantling

in borrowed bonfires.

Then insisting

on being called witches.

Witches

whose imagined bloodlines

stretch back

to the women

burnt and pillaged

long before witchcraft

became a metaphor

people learned to wear.

It’s cute,

because the witches they invoke

needed neither slogans

nor curated enemies.

They carried conviction

where others now carry performance.

They were not rehearsed.

They were consequences.

Hunted not for convenient defiance,

but for refusing the grammar of obedience.

Not applauded

for learning the choreography of dissent,

because dissent was never affordable to them.

They did not mistake

spectacle

for resistance.

And that is the slow tragedy

of borrowed martyrdom:

the further it drifts

from the fire,

the more it begins to resemble

something that never burned.

Something safe enough

to re-enact.

Something soft enough

to survive applause.

Something distant enough

to forget heat.

It’s cute,

because witches came

with spine

and with magic.

Their self-anointed descendants

have neither;

only costumes,

echoes,

and the luxury

of confusing theatre

for revolution.

And the most dangerous part

is not the performance itself,

but how easily

the audience begins

to forget

what fire was for.