Landing, Plymouth Rock
1. Susannah White, passenger
There were no cabins - we squatted
below deck with the livestock,
the sea a constant baptism. Geese
burst against the steep ship’s sides
- sacks of guts and feathers.
I thought, as we dragged our skirts ashore,
we would be back in our proper element.
But the sand shifts in waves and fills our eyes.
The wood we brought is swollen, the nails rusty.
In the wind there is a new silence.
The men have gone to search for food.
It is Lizzie and Mary and I together.
We have fashioned a shelter
from bent-knuckled branches and blankets.
We skin and eat an injured gull.
Mary bellows and bleats as her child tries
to come. All night we sing to her
songs of the forest and meadow.
At day break we pull him out, hope lost.
She holds him up, crying what am I to do with this?
This life is a gradual narrowing of light.
Why give her an empty vessel
with twisted limbs and shut eyes?
She cannot even bury him –
the sand covers, uncovers.
Lizzie and I hide him with rocks, carefully
but still, they kick his skin. We do not
place a cross. When Mary sleeps
Lizzie and I hold our babies to us,
dear Oceanus, my darling Peregrine.
2. William White, who dyed of the “terrible sickness”
They tell me I am lying on a beach in daylight. I must be looking up because everything is blue and spacious but, underneath, the sand is corpse and carrion cold. When I move my head carefully from side to side it makes a mean little scratching sound.
My hands and feet are the size of ships. I miss the dark afternoons already, though I see they have invaded my skin which is ashes and tar. The flesh crawls out of my mouth which will never now be kissed. My wife prays for me, at a distance, turning the baby’s face away. I hear her singing rock-a-bye-baby. I am on that tree top. I would sing to him also if my lungs were not sodden paper.
Mummy make the clouds keep still- the way they rush over me makes me despair. Are they going home? If I could go with them in a cooking pot or cradle I would kiss the barren field, Susannah, I would bless the scabbed apples, the potato blight. Oh for stunted pumpkins, still bright on the white earth!
My arms, like the trees here, reach in one direction. Daddy make the wind stop-it will kill me with its whipping and wailing. Will Susannah bring me a sponge full of water, a sea biscuit? By dark I will become November, raising my purple cloak, snuffing myself out.
Page(s) 111-113
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