The Death of Pocahontas

I’m really grateful to Artemis journal (USA) for publishing this poem last month:

The Death of Pocahontas

This was the Thames, she had thought, not the Styx,

having sailed with the tide from London’s wharves
but berthed some miles downstream.

Gravesend, they said.
Not a name that augurs well. And then,
confined to her bunk in fever, back it all flowed:

not the spires and domes,
the forbidding Tower or the stinking streets,
the clangour of bells; not the Palace at Whitehall,
that warren of rooms, noisy and odorous
with courtiers in their wealth of clothing;
nor her presentation at Court.

In the half-light of her cabin – the ship restlessly
shifting with the water, its timbers groaning and cracking –
she lay weakening, her great adventure fading.

In her delirium she walked again the coast
where she was born; paddled its lagoons and creeks;
she breathed the thick humidity of summer nights thrumming
with insect life; heard voices in her own language
whispering of still-unrelinquished beliefs
and her secret name spoken. 

They had taken on board fresh water, supplies
for a dozen weeks at sea but were moored here, aghast,
watching, her great adventure prematurely fading.

And yet – such a journey! Even the snow goose,
appearing on the lakes of her native land each fall,

travels merely in time and space.

© John Looker 2018

This is the last of ten poems that consider historic or legendary journeys, to be the opening part of a book in draft entitled “Shimmering Horizons”. Other poems from the draft book have been published in other journals and anthologies. Artemis journal, founded in 1977,  publishes poetry and art ‘from the Blue Ridge Mountains and beyond’ – see artemisjournal.org