George Percy, Leader of the Virginia Colonists
on Their Desperation During the Starving Time
James Towne, Late Winter, 1610
No ship saves us from this our ghastly winnowing.
Today, in three communal kettles, we boil the last
of our leather aprons, our fine saddlery trappings,
and boots harvested from the bodies of our frozen
dead. Thus shall we fill our bellies as we must lest
we sup on air. Our dogs, cats, horses, and vermin
of every sort, we have already eaten. The savages,
who for months have encircled our palisade, taunt
us today with a creel of dried corn which ravishes
our common senses, as it lies just beyond the range
of our muskets. A fortnight ago, Hugh Price, lately
of Lutterworth, and newly bereft of his mind, raged
in the marketplace that if there were truly a just god
He would not suffer creatures whom He had made
and framed to endure such miseries. And, indeed,
a mere day and a half later, in the woods nearby,
he met his Maker, slain by Powhatans as brutally
outside these walls as famine hath slain us inside.
Others less addled have endured the selfsame fate
as hunger compelled them to risk foraging at dusk
beyond the gates for moss, pine bark, and snakes.
And one other, whom I shall not herewith name,
a colonist depraved beyond all reason, murdered
his young wife as she lay fast asleep beside him,
then cut out the child in her womb and threw it
in the river. Hours later, after butchering his wife,
he scored, salted, and potted what he could not eat.
We hanged him by the thumbs, with iron weights
upon his feet, a quarter of an hour before he would
confess the same. For such heinous crimes, fraught
with the Devil’s own bile, we burned him alive.
We who are left have not murdered. Nor do we
dream of it. Yet our brains buzz like beehives
each time we resurrect a body from this foul earth.
We beg God for forgiveness, and believe that He
offers it to us even as we sin anew in our cursed
extremity. When the leather is gone, we shall go
about stewing what is left of the young wife’s flesh
in a broth of roots, herbs, and well-powdered bone.
This poem originally appeared in Slippery Elm Literary Journal, C/O 2020, (University of Findlay, Findlay, OH)
After Your Diagnosis
Drew Woods State Nature Preserve, Western Darke County, Ohio, May, 2021
We entered by stealth its fifteen acres of uncut
forest and buttonbush ponds, having already broken
the rules with our spontaneous intrusion for want
of a guide, the air heady, freighted with the silken
shifting of light through the overstory of maples
and three-hundred-year-old oaks, their feet rooted
and spectral beneath the water’s faintly opaque
surface. And as for us, we were family, well versed
in nature, and then utterly entranced by all of it,
each sedge and rush asserting survival and beauty
as were a pair of pileated woodpeckers, aloft
high above their dead shagbark hickory’s aerie,
each of which left you, my darling, more present
than you had been in days, garrulous and wide-eyed
at your own wit, likening the preserve to heaven
years before you began your departure to paradise.
This poem originally appeared in Embracing Wetlands, Edith Chase Poetry Reading
at Kent State University, May 17th, 2024 (Last Exit Press)
After Your Passing
Musters of crows gather in the darkening maples
overlooking our feeder creek, unctuous undertakers
of the netherworld as they converge there to mate,
nest, and gossip in the last days of late mid-winter.
Such incursions we bickered about but could not
rebuke, having refused to believe in their divination
even as the creek, flush with snow and snow-melt,
ascended its banks, nature’s artful scheme unaided
by you or your obsessions. For years you harvested
stones from the fields, laying down in the shallows
of the creek crossing after crossing from one side
to the other, convinced they would outlast us both.
Now your death proves you to be partly right
as the water, ferrying your ashes, fills with light.
This poem originally appeared in A Confluence of Poems, A Tribute to Tributaries, 8th Annual Edith Chase Poetry Reading at Kent State University, May 16th, 2025 (Last Exit Press)
A More Radical Course to Consider
Thornton House, built originally in Johnston, Rhode Island in 1761 by Daniel Thornton, was sold, taken apart, and re-erected in Greenville, Ohio from August of 1987 to August of 1988.
Once I believed our beloveds awaited us
in queues along the gilded avenues of Paradise,
our good works on this mortal plane leavening
the likelihood of us each entering heaven’s
gates, if not its sanctum. Yet such a fool I’d
been, imagining my husband aligned
with Daniel Thornton, who, now loosed
upon history here, still manages to overrule
his wife, Sussanna. He inhales in this
ancient house her scent, a bodily fragrance
of inescapable provenance, proving that she,
too, inhabits his haunting. But here the newest
spirit of all is Ollie, our wisecracking cockatiel
in thrall to my husband’s newly permed curls,
who pecks at them in perfect time to our cell
phone’s ringtone. What an idiotic, comedic
pair, head to toe, my husband and Ollie made
in life, and even more so as they remake
their routine with each additional apparition,
a circus of sorts, for no other partition
separates us from the ether. As for who is still
alive, it is I, the sole owner, who must fill
the fireboxes with wood when the furnace
fails, or light candles when the electric lapses,
or relearn dozens of other skills I never knew
I knew. Yes, applause, please. Thank you
for your kindness. I will, of course, decamp
as soon as possible, perhaps to Canada,
or even back to my own small hometown,
only thirteen miles from my girlhood home.
There are spirits there, but they are warmer
and wiser, and, though they are younger,
are more restrained. The spirits here are not,
but instead, as my husband would say, are hot
to trot, a phrase he used to describe himself,
dear reader, but never in my presence.
Love makes choices, and if he proves
faithful love may last until time unspools,
the universe cools, and we are mere specks
of humanity drifting across the cosmos,
but if he fails, I will order here a cleansing,
and leave them all to their manic cockeyed ends.
Myrna Stone is the author of six full-length books of poetry: The Resurrectionist’s Diary (Dos Madres Press, 2021); Luz Bones (Etruscan Press, 2017); In the Present Tense: Portraits of My Father (White Violet Press, 2013), a finalist for the 2014 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry; The Casanova Chronicles (Etruscan Press, 2010), a finalist for the 2011 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry; How Else to Love the World (Browser Book Publishing, 2007); and The Art of Loss (Michigan State University Press, 2001), for which she was named 2001 Ohio Poet of the Year.
She has received three Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards in Poetry, a Full Fellowship to Vermont Studio Center, the 2017 New Letters Poetry Prize, and the 2002 Poetry Award from Weber, The Contemporary West. Her poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and have appeared in such journals as Poetry, Ploughshares, Boston Review, TriQuarterly, The Massachusetts Review, Nimrod, River Styx and Southwest Review, among many others. Myrna's poems have also appeared in sixteen anthologies including Flora Poetica: The Chatto Book of Botanical Verse.
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