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Clara Changxin Fang: Lost Colony

October 24, 2016 by PBQ

Settled in the Spring of 1584, Roanoke was the first English colony in North America.  
 
We built two story houses  
with stone walls on dry mud,  
the island a crumbling sandbar 
pummeled by wind and waves.    
We erected fences and fence posts,  
laid claim to a patch of wilderness  
like Ptolemy mapping the heavens,  
giving titles to congregations of stars.  
 
We found a bay with oysters  
 
more numerous than pebbles  
and a seashore bright with starfish  
and sand dollars. What we didn't find  
was gold to fill our ships  
or rain to coax our harvest.  
 
For three years no sails appeared  
on the horizon. (The way I waited for you,  
love, absent on the horizon.) 
 
Only the blinding clarity of a cloudless sky  
ushering us towards winter.   
 
Disaster is the absence of events.  
 
The sun wheeled the heavens like a flour mill,  
everlasting waves lashed at the shore;  
no boats in sight, the sea  
rolled back our memories of home—  
The reek of urine in the streets of London,  
the towers of Parliament spearing the sky  
like a row of bayonets above a river of blood. The hulls 
of abandoned vessels lurking beyond sight.  
 
2.  
 
CRO – Letters carved into a tree stump at Roanoke before the colony’s disappearance in 1590.  
 
Nothing remained of what we owned.  
No pottery, no tools, not even our own bones.  
 
What we brought with us was filched  
by the fingers of the ocean and the shadow of the moon.  
 
Not even a dream in which you appear,  
a shadow behind a wall of water.  
 
Beloved, did I imagine us walking hand in hand  
in the city of cathedrals, your hands  
 
smelling of baked bread, the afternoon sun  
glazing rooftops and sidewalks with gold.    
 
I hold on to evidence— 
a pebble plucked from the Rue Monge,  
a sprig of lavender from the apothecary,  
the dress I wore the last night.  
 
On the island, the letters CRO,  
a bird with a golden beak and black wings,  
all that’s left to tell of our departure.  
 
No violence had been done.  
We simply gave up waiting for salvation to appear  
 
like a chalice falling out of the heavens 
or the waters parting to reveal a road. 
 
I gave birth to a child. 
Even without news of you, we are happy.  
 
How bright the moon shines without city lights!   
I remain ever your loving,  
 
Eleanor 
 
3.   
 
500—The number of mountains destroyed by mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia, including  
Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee.  
 
We named her Virginia— 
land of blue ridged mountains,  
fish chocked rivers and timber stands  
vast enough to build all the battleships of Europe.  
 
After centuries we are still after  
what brought us here:  
timber, fur, coal, the exhumed remains  
of ancient forests we burn to light our homes.  
 
Today asphalt cuts through  
this valley like a ribbon of steel  
and explosions shave the scalp  
off of tree covered mountains.  
Rocks shatter like fragments of a skull.  
 
Men excavate hillsides, blast  
through rock, bringing down avalanches  
of boulders, mud, and branches, bodies  
tumble down like logs, the women  
buried them in their coal stained clothes 
with the children they miscarried.  
 
Some abandoned this place,  
let mud and rain pull their houses 
back into the earth. Most stayed,  
subsisting from the mountains  
they helped to destroy.  
 
This gutted Appalachia  
is a war zone, but one 
we still call home. 
 
4. 
 
Arlington, Virginia 
June 1992 
 
Dear Chen Ying, 

Virginia is a beautiful. I walk to the Potomac River with mother every evening, and we watch the sun go
down over the mountains, orange slices on the water, geese gliding over the surface like the airplanes
landing at Reagan airport. Everything here is bigger and faster, we ride in dragons shaped like cars. Here
we play with Barbie dolls instead of silk worms, and in the autumn the leaves turn read like the lanterns
during the Spring Festival, and we light candles inside pumpkins carved with hideous faces; unlike our 
friendly family ghosts, they have no names and confer no blessings. I am learning new words: crow,
cloud, kite. You must speak here in order to survive. In social studies, we learned about a group of English
people who sailed here in a tiny ship, build a settlement on an island, and disappeared a few years later.
Eleanor's father came back to look for them, but he never found his daughter or his grandchild. I am 
thinking of her today, the family she abandoned, who abandoned her, the beach extinguished of stars, the
country's interior so vast and full of terrors, the night rustling with strange sounds. Sometimes wonder
overtakes fear: the air is clean here, it smells like daffodils. The children have yellow hair like the tassels
of corn, and like scarecrows, it's hard to tell if they are real, but when they fall they cry like we do. Next
time I'll send you the flowers I'm growing, heliotrope and nasturtiums, pressed into dictionaries we 
should study but use as weights. Until then I subsist on the memory of your smiles, the sticky buns we ate
together on festival days.
Missing you, 
  
Chang Xin 

Filed Under: Contributors 94, Issue 94, Poetry, Poetry 94, Uncategorized Tagged With: Clara Changxin Fang, Contributors 94, Poetry, Poetry 94

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