Thursday, July 5, 2018

Hart Island


I wrote this poem about Hart Island, New York's "potter's field," a number of years ago, and it appears in my collection, Things Seen in Graveyards. This poignant article today in The New York Times revisits the island to ask what happened to the AIDS victims whose bodies were sent there. Even the dead were shunned and their coffins were piled up while workers were afraid to touch them. I wondered sometimes whether my flight from New York in 1985 was an over-reaction -- a vast majority of friends and acquaintances had died, and this article confirms that, noting that 100,000 died in New York during the peak of the epidemic, making up one quarter of the nation's victims.


Ferry cuts fog
in Long Island Sound,
baleful horn bellowing

a midnight run
unblessed by harbor lights,
unknown to sleeping millions

convicts at the rails,
guards behind them,
dour-faced captain at the helm
a face and a pipe
and a dead-ahead glare,
an empty gaze that asks no questions
offers no advice

A careful mooring,
cables thicker than hanging noose
bind ship to pier;
pilings like pagan columns
bind pier to Hart Island

Convicts shuffle to the end of the dock,
guards behind them with billy clubs
hands tensed at holster.
You fellas better behave now,
the captain mutters,
just do what you're told.
And no funny business, another voice warns,
'cause anything could happen to you here.

The prisoners shiver at moonless expanse
of blackened water,
dead shell of Bronx one way,
bedrooms of Queens the other;
clap their hands,
blow on their fingers
to fight the chill.

Guess you would freeze, one speculates

before you could swim to shore.

Just do what you’re told,
the biggest con admonishes.
I been here before. Do what
you’re told and then it's over.
Eager to earn
the early release,
willing to dig
and lift and carry,
they turn to the foreman.
He points to the tarp
that covers the cargo.

They lift the tiny oblong boxes,
frail as balsa
thin pine confining
the swaddled contents.
What's in these things?
one asks, taking on three
stacked to his chin.
Over there, is all the foreman says,
pointing to mounds
where a silent back hoe
stands sentinel.
These be coffins, the older con explains.
Baby coffins.

They lower the boxes
into the waiting holes,
read the tags attached to them:
Baby Boy Franklin
Carl Hernandez
Unknown Baby Girl, Hispanic.
The adult coffins are heavier,
two men at least to carry each one.
They can joke about these:
Heavy bastard, this Jose.
Carla here, she musta wasted away.
But no one speaks about the babies.
The convicts' eyes grow angry, then sad.

Later the mounds will be toppled,
the soil returned to the holes,
flattened and tamped
with a cursory blessing
by an ecumenical chaplain.

These are the lonely dead,
the snuffout of innocence:

crack babies
AIDS babies
babies dead from drive-by bullets
babies abandoned like unwanted kittens
dumpster children

No wonder this island cries in its sleep.


New York Times on Hart Island