Salt - Susan Lamont

[Larry Robinson]

Salt

for my 5th great-grandmother, buried at sea in 1755, first name unknown

 
I imagine cormorants, black against rinsed sky, fog

a second skin, your hands on the ship's slick rail to steady

yourself against the tide that day you fled. I imagine

 
your leave-taking, rough unpainted door, hedgerow

of hawthorn in bud, blue song-thrush eggs safe in their nest,

left behind with your idle loom. Ulster's kings of commerce

 
no longer trade in linen, raised the rent, pressed your life to the margins.

Your family can only imagine freedom and plenty somewhere that is not home.

A rough migration along the curve of the earth leaves the Irish Sea behind,

 
your ears filled with wind, heaven past the horizon, just out of reach.

I imagine ingots of light igniting the waves as smallpox ignites

your cheeks, your fevered dreams of home, the hawthorn buds, open,

 
their honeyed scent, a thrush's fluting song, while on this ship,

three children, John, Jacob, Sarah, clutch their father's homespun shirt,

bereft. I imagine a life, a death, your memory a whisper,

 
nameless. No shroud save your linen apron. No Memento mori 

on lichened stone. The salt of fever and tears joins all the unnamed

beneath the waves, your life just so much salt in the wound of the world.


	- Susan Lamont

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