Perishable women--
the colonial graveyards
are strewn with your bones,
the islands of the Caribbean
are rich with your deaths.
You perished
like the creatures of the reefs,
bringing forth your kind.

Perishable women--
dying at twenty, twenty-three,
"Beloved wife & Tender Mother,"
long lamented by your husband
(& his wives),
survivors who outlasted you,
then died
the way you died.

Only the men lived on
to perish in the wars,
to die of sharkbite
or of fever, bloody flux,
the smallpox, even leprosy
or gout
(one ate well
on these islands in the sun).

Everyone was perishable;
children died
like flies;
& women died
in giving birth to children
who would die.

God was blamed,
& Nature's mighty hand
which wrought her handiwork
imperfectly,
& broke a hundred vessels
in the sea
that one whole
cup might be.

Perishable women-
smashed like pots
upon the floor beneath the wheel,
crushed like shells upon the beach,
like husks of coconut,
like bits of bottle glass.
At my age I'd be dead.

You would not be.

© Erica Mann Jong

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