Milena Williamson, "Milk & Moon-water"

 

Milena Williamson, photo by Stephanie Sy-Quia

Milena Williamson is from Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. She has an MA and PhD in poetry, both from the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast. Her debut pamphlet, Charm for Catching a Train, was published with Green Bottle Press in 2022. Her debut collection, Into the Night that Flies So Fast, was published with Dedalus Press in 2024. In 2021, she received the Society of Authors’ Eric Gregory Award. In 2022, she received a support for the individual artists programme grant from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland for work that became Milk & Moon-water.

About Milk & Moon-water

A Sudden Stitch. Unfruitful Land. A Fever. 

In Milk & Moon-water, Milena Williamson uncovers 11 Old English metrical charms – ancient incantations spoken to ward off harm – creatively translating them into magical and medicinal spells for the modern reader. 

Alongside each reimagining is an original charm poem, a remixed and new telling of an old text. Covering the climate crisis, illness, ageing and fertility, this collection of charms ranges from the incantatory to the unhinged, and re-engages with the ancient practice of looking to the land and the body for answers to life’s new and persisting questions.

You can read more about Milk & Moon-water on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Milk & Moon-water

Charm for Unfruitful Land (Remixed)

The good news is the wolves have returned to Europe.

   The bad news is people are killing wolves again. I own no

underwear from this island. There is no purely wild place left

   on this island. I buy wildflower seeds from the dark web.

I walk on the earth while there is still time and sprinkle seeds

   on riverbanks, lawns and graveyards. The smoke pours

across borders and becomes the sky. It’s time to buy an air filter

   and give it a name. I am stuck inside a well and Europe

is the silver bucket framed against the sky. We are living

   in the overlap. We can create clouds from seawater.

We drilled into Antarctica to find the most transparent ice.

   This ice is compressed by other ice so it’s dark down there,

dark enough to see neutrinos belly-flop into light.

 

Journey Charm (Remixed)

With eight lanes on the upper

and six lanes on the lower,

the busiest bridge in the world

is a sonnet. Love, we are suspended

in steel between the river and the sky.

Manhattan and a flood warning

is a good backdrop for listing everything

that has spilled on the GW Bridge –

gas and manure and watermelon

and frozen chicken. Upper or lower?

A man once landed a plane here

and survived. Now there’s a woman

on the median selling fresh oranges.

We see the signs. The lanes divide.