“In Brooklyn, in an old vault, mark’d by no special recognition, lie huddled at this moment the undoubtedly authentic remains of the staunchest and earliest patriots from the British prison ships.”
Epigraph to “The Wallabout Martyrs” by Walt Whitman
Louisa cooked a full boil stew
as I flung myself out the door.
Down Flushing Ave, onto the sands
of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, I breathed
expanding industrial air. Greater than memory
of Achilles or Ulysses, more, more by far to thee than
the tomb of Alexander, here are the shipbuilding docks
and rope-making factories. I shield myself against a winter gust
coming over the Atlantic deep, propelling Hezekiah Pierpont’s
wind-driven gin distillery. I pocket a collectable seashell
while spotting a malnourished and diseased record.
Like a torch in a cave, the bones flash before my eyes.
The son of a Quaker carpenter, I kneeled into the beach, held the thirteenth rib.
Yellow fever ravaged this life. I gathered the memory
of leaning forward in the kitchen to hear my grandmother narrate
the martyred heroics of my grand-uncle in the Battle of Brooklyn.
Did these relics fight alongside his ancestry? Redcoats hauled Christopher Vail
into captivity after the battle, into the service of the king of horrors
on Good Hope rocking in Wallabout Bay. The commissioners pretended
to allow a half a pound of bread, and four ounces of pork per day.
What was given for three days was not enough for one.
I mouthed my grandmother’s words through the pitch of remembrance.
The grains clung to my soles. I clutched the calcified time.
*
Robert Sheffield escaped from the HMS Jersey, told The Connecticut Gazette
you must pray if nothing else. Beaten by British guns, ultraviolet-roasted
revolutionaries immersed their rags of dignity into the waves.
Bare feet stamped out the blue but the salt remained on battlefields of skin.
On July fourth, they sought to sing and be merry by displaying
thirteen national flags. The guards commanded they take every last one away.
Under a hungry moon, silence was a stranger to their abode. The groans, the curses,
the delirium within that confined heat of mangled selves.
In the morn’, Captain Thomas Dring ascended the stairs into a New York blaze
by gawping at his silk handkerchief covered with fleas. They festered
upon his body. The bloodshot sun clamored in the sky.
The captain shunned a stare from the bodies lowering down the ship sides
by a rope round them as tho’ they were beasts. Carried on shore in heaps
to the edge of the bank, a hole was dug 1 or 2 feet deep and all hove in together.
Walt sprints to recover a shovel and offer the patriots a solid ground burial.
Those cart loads of old charnel ashes, scales, and splints
of mouldy bones, once living men — once resolute courage, aspiration,
strength, the stepping stones to thee to-day and here, America.
Once I dug a grave in the invading dusk,
I stood beside a cavity on frozen soil. Louisa waited for me
at our North Portland Avenue home.