Scurvy by Faith Shearin
MARGINALIA • SKIP TO THE POEM
1.
I feel the panic spreading like piss on snow. You learn someone dies, someone else is in the hospital. What can I do to keep myself safe, what can I do to not be filled with worry every waking moment, what can I do against everything I cannot see?
2.
Nightmares night after night. It’s like picking at a scab, a wound that refuses to heal. Everything coming undone.
3.
I pound my chest, I say, toughen up, you in there.
Scurvy
Faith ShearinWhen sailors crossed the oceans
their gums bled and their teeth
grew as loose as screen doorsin the wind. They ate old biscuits
and salted meats and bruises
appeared like stains overtheir bodies and then they began
unhealing: the arm they broke
as a child when they fell froma tree unmended and the gash
in their knee when they were thrown
from a horse reopened. All the oldwounds were new, as if
time had undone itself, as if
each injury is permanent,just waiting to show itself again.
It was worse the second time,
not having fallen from a treeor horse, but suffering anyway,
in the middle of the ocean, where,
for weeks, no land was visible.
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This poem appeared in Telling the Bees by Faith Shearin, published by Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2015. Shared here with profound gratitude.
Read more works by Faith Shearin • Find books by this poet • Or view my library
Explore poems in pursuit of: journeys • the sea • surviving • Or browse the index
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—
Fran Tilley
T, every day you just nail it, your words and the poem you choose. Today’s is devastating. I sip coffee as the rain falls, safe and comfortable on the other side of the globe where the pandemic has been oh so tightly controlled. My heart aches for you and your world, living daily with fear. The church bell just tolled,May your gods protect you and keep you safe.