(Margaret Dawson Raughton Attawell Grimes, 1596-1659)
Thin thread I pull
without a needle
a petticoat
bought for each
mayde in 1621
Virginia-bound
& yes it is my
fancy this one red
sea-swept petti-
coat sailed on
to 1658 given &
bequeathed
unto a daughter
dead by 1661
and so bequeathed
again beside
two cows
color unknown.
So much depends
upon
a red petti-
coat
bedraggled
in red sandy loam
Pamunkey soil
snagged & patched
& blotted stains
this voyaged
petticoat
more likely
slashed to strips
to catch
the moon-pulled
flow bequeathed
to mother daughter
daughter’s
daughter the way
in 1968 my granny
along the silty banks
of Cutshin Creek
stuffed rags
between my legs
(Hannah Mace (or Massey) Wroughton, 1668–1738, approx.)
If every poem is a love poem,
grandmother,
is there enough to write
this one for you? A name.
Hannah.
Maybe Anna.
Wroughton like the rest of them
who crossed the threshold
into marriage with my long-ago kin.
Is there enough of you
to write this poem,
grandmother?
The muddy skirts you raise
to step across the starboard rim
and through the pools of briny sand
to your new home,
the Vale of Misery,
upon an island clinging to a river
you call Hungar?
The hoe you raise,
the fire you bank,
the rope that dips and lifts
the tanned hide bucket at the well.
What else to do but, like the swallow,
make a nest where you might lay your young?
Was it enough,
grandmother,
your scrabbling, chasing life?
And now your bones,
your ancient, furrowed bones
once laid to rest with psalm and song
are long since swallowed
by a ravening river’s tide.
Is it enough to end this poem,
grandmother,
as I began. Your name
a palindrome,
and this a scavenged love poem
given from my body,
its flesh and blood and bone,
tethered by its cells
to the mystery of your own.
(Rachel [Wroten or Woodland] Wroten, 1704-1754)
What household gods were tucked beneath your red
petticoats, carried from Maryland to Delaware, just west
of that great swamp which drains into the head of Indian River?
Whose curse lay on your skin that you would die and let a new
wife’s mark be made upon the deed that sold your husband’s
parcel of the family island? “Father’s Good Will.” Passed son to
son to son, no more. I have to think, grandmother, that you knew
your Bible stories much better than I do. That other Rachel.
She too was married to her cousin, left the fatherland in search
of promised land, her father’s teraphim swaddled safely
in the rags she wore between her legs. Her claim the way of women
was upon her. Untouchable. Untouched. And neither of you
known for the steady pushing out of babies, though when at last
you did, they came equipped with the family jewels. And Rachel,
did you also weep, your ghost a figure shrouded in the fog
that settles by the bay, to know your first-born son, teetering
on the wrong side of the Revolution, fled in exile toward
the Appalachian wilderness? And thus, my mountain tribe begun.
Well, maybe. You were your Wroten husband’s Wroten kin,
or you were not. Your eldest may have claimed the traitor’s coat
of red before he and his family slipped into a westbound caravan
of Quakers, or perhaps like his father and his father’s fathers
it was only that he fancied change. More land. A dream
of buffalo. To kiss his wife without the briny taste of sea
passed tongue to tongue. Maybe that other Rachel, too, had a story
of her own nobody wanted to remember until it was too late.
(Elizabeth [] Raughton, 1730-1810)
These days the grandmothers are with me
always, their names rattling in my mind
like mismatched silver in an old tin box.
Margaret, Joanna, Hannah, Rachel,
and then you, Elizabeth. For fifty years or more
you lived the rhythms of the tide,
knowing only toss of fate and then return.
Delaware Bay. 1784. Why leave that home
to start again? Your husband, sons, their wives,
the youngest just a bundle at his mother’s breast.
“Soon they were off in wagons, horseback, some walking and hunting along the
way… ”
Call it hunger. Call it possibility.
Call it survival of the line.
“…through Virginia by Old Town, crossing the mountains at Old Piper's
Gap, and on into North Carolina.”
The old stories are no use to me. Not Eve
cast from the garden. No pillared salt to mark
the place you must decide. Grandmother, let me
mold for you a body from the clay of all my wonderings.
“…crossed a stream Ararat… the Yadkin River
at Shallow Ford…”
A braid of gray. Wind-chapped hands that pull
the babies through their mother’s legs. I’ll make you
long of limb enough to trudge beside your husband,
shouldering the yoke of endless miles
“…then traveled westward to the foothills…
above the chills and fevers of the lowlands.”
to where there’s only mountain
rising up where there once was sky.
Here’s another thing I never thought to know. When frontier families swaddled up the latest babies, packed their spoons and porringers into their saddlebags, and trampled onward toward the manly dream of liberty and property, first they burned their cabins to the ground, then foraged in the ashes for the measly count of nails, each precious shank and head wrought by a blacksmith’s hand. I read this in a book of poems, that place of wisdom’s greeny flowering. I am searching for the nails. What can I do but trust the timber will be there to harvest when at last I find a plot of land.
Pauletta Hansel’s tenth poetry collection is Will There Also Be Singing? (Shadelandhouse Modern Press, 2024), poems of witness and protest. Heartbreak Tree (Madville Publications, 2022) won the Poetry Society of Virginia’s North American Book Award. Pauletta was Cincinnati’s first Poet Laureate and 2022 Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County Writer-in-Residence. She leads writing workshops and retreats virtually and in the Greater Cincinnati area and beyond. Visit her website at https://paulettahansel.wordpress.com/.
Images of Mars’ polar cap, Uranus on a fly-by, and the Sun’s corona, courtesy of NASA
