The Starving Time, Jamestown, 1610

← v1n2, Fall 2002

Only the moon saw him lick blood

From snow beneath the palisade, hold

Crystals to his lips like a priest

Steadying a chalice of wine.

Only the candle twisting on its wick

Saw him hook the pot over flames,

Lean over his wife with a knife

As if to kiss her on the table.

Nothing could cure his hunger.

He opened her belly the way his father

Cut through feathers of sick chickens

Outside their house in Gloucestershire.

He bundled the fetus in deerskin,

Sank it with stones through a hole

Chopped with an axe in the James River.

An owl hooted like a drowsy rooster.

With only flames as witnesses

He boiled pieces of her for the supper

He knew might be his last,

Then stared at grease on his hands

And asked the fire's ash: How else

Could I build God's paradise

In this frozen swamp? How else

Could our divided bodies become one?

*Some of the first settlers in Jamestown, Virginia, resorted to cannibalism during what became known as The Starving Time. This incident is based on an account given by a settler George Percy in his brief history: A True Relation of the proceedings and occurrents of moment which have hap'ned in Virginia from the time Sir Thomas Gates was shipwrack'd upon the Bermudes, anno 1609, until my departure out of the country, which was anno Domini 1612.

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Henry Hart

Henry Hart is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Familiar Ghosts (Orchises Press, 2014), and two biographies, The Life of Robert Frost (Wiley-Blackwell, 2017) and James Dickey: The World as a Lie (Picador, 2000). His poetry and essays have appeared in The New Yorker , Gettysburg Review , Kenyon Review , New England Review , and The Southern Review , among others. He is the recipient of the Carole Weinstein Prize in Poetry and was named the poet laureate of Virginia in 2018. Hart is the Mildred and J.B. Hickman Professor of English and Humanities at the College of William & Mary.