“John Smith in Virginia,” a poem by Ron Smith.
“This Smith, always shouting,
cursing, scribbling, boasting . . . Where is,
the men grumble, the gold?”
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BROAD STREET invites you to enjoy this poem from our “Maps & Legends” issue. It’s presented here as a broadside to download and print out — or you can scroll past and read the whole poem in plain text.
John Smith in Virginia
for Cliff Dickinson
In two hundred years it would become
the island they were ordered to settle,
that deep-water peninsula swarming
with death.
At Point Comfort they hailed,
thus christened, “The James!”
Captain Newport’s letters sing
the beauties and the bounties of this
fair land, one-third
of the continent their Virginia, one-third
of the men gentle, soft handed. And
then there’s this Smith, no
gentleman, the Big Mouth
their documents reveal
as one of their leaders. Sheesh. He grins
like a wolf as they take off the shackles.
In Holland he’d fought the Spaniard,
in Transylvania, the Turk (he said),
had taken three turbaned heads
and a coat of arms. At the Globe,
Hamlet fretted about being,
while was Smith all over the globe
furiously becoming. Tedious,
all that beheading, he yawns, then
tells them of the Ottoman princess,
beautiful, of course, who had fallen
for him and saved his
blah blah blah. Indian, Ottoman, severed heads,
maidens — seen one, seen ’em all.
So, after five months Atlanticking, they
chop pines, build huts, and, of course,
a church. This Smith, always shouting,
cursing, scribbling, boasting . . . Where is,
the men grumble, the gold?
Newport sails blithely
away, two of three ships stuffed with sassafras
for London’s syphilis. (New World give it us,
New World damn well cure it, eh?)
A year later Newport finds thirty-eight souls,
and those starving. “Let us pray,” he says,
and down go the skeletons on their swollen knees.
Indians, their only hope for help, attack. Newport
sails away — so Smith gets down to work,
dickers with Powhatan, gets saved by
a (yawn) princess not far from Richmond —
See the ghostly towers shimmering in the future! —
disciplines the men
to mutiny with six-hour shifts, this crowd
of Maynard G. Krebses shouting Work?!
Some grow calluses, all resentments.
They construct, let us say, our first (pitiful) Pentagon.
For their constant streams of glowing lies,
Smith and Newport earn more and more
micromanagement: Find a northwest passage,
find the Roanoke Islanders, find, by God,
some gold. Oh, and put this crown on
Powhatan’s greasy head, wrap him
in this scarlet cloak. Or, just
kill him and find another. And don’t forget
to convert the savages.
When someone tries
to blow off his balls, Smith sees his chance.
Powder burns want London medicos,
he says and off, sarcastically, he sails.
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Ron Smith recently served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia, and he is the Writer-in-Residence at St. Christopher’s School in Richmond.
His books are Running Again in Hollywood Cemetery, Moon Road, Its Ghostly Workshop, and The Humility of the Brutes.
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