Читать книгу Rising - Jane Beal - Страница 20

I can’t tell you my secret name. Only

my father names me by that name.

I can’t show you how I ran naked before

I was eight or the deerskin skirt I had

at twelve. My turkey-feather winter-cloak

is gone like the sands of time dripping down

the hourglass you keep on your desk.

But I can show you the pot my mother made

with her own hands from the earth by the river

before my father, the Pohowtan, sent

her away to live with another man

in another village, and I never saw

her again. Remember, after you English

came to our shores, women pressed your cloth

into the clay pots to make new designs.

I am my mother’s pot, my flesh is

her living clay, and you, John, have pressed your cloth

into my fabled skin and made me new,

as I, growing big-bellied with child,

lay dead fish in your corn fields to make them grow

for the boy I sing to when you call me

Rebecca, the noose who snared you, and I

call you Isaac when I hold you inside

my soul still turning cartwheels by tide

pools in Virginia, by rivers of water

frothing white over darkened waves where

the ocean meets Tenakomakah lands,

where the ocean from the east meets the river

from the west, north of Jamestown, where

your people first settled, and I fed them

corn and pumpkin seeds when they were dying.

The dying lived, and you came, and brought me

back to the King of England, who danced

with me at a masque as Ben Jonson’s players

revealed a vision of delight, harmony,

and wonder, heralding a spring I will

never see with you, my John, my Isaac:

hold my hand in yours, my husband,

for it is enough that our child shall live.