Footnotes

Karen Warinsky

Pulling shards
we tug them from the earth
rebirth them into consciousness,
read rock carvings like history lessons,
seek recognition in ancient reflections.

What comes to the surface
beyond stone and bone,
is love and hate
fear and ignorance,
sometimes wisdom.

The virus was powerful,
it charged through the community,
colonist and native,
rich and poor,
and a little planting of the variola
gave immunity.

The smallpox hospital
kept convalescents
but afternoons they’d walk to Brookfield’s caves,
carve their initials or a sentence
into the granite and the schist
making their own memorials,
engraving footnotes.

The Science

People continue to discover many Native American petroglyphs and Colonial inscriptions lost to the deep forests of New England. The inscriptions referenced in this piece were found in the ‘smallpox caves’ of Brookfield, MA where recovering patients were allowed to visit on afternoon walks from the hospital in the 1700s/1800s.  One of the Brookfield inscriptions says, "I had smallpox here April 19, 1788. I.A.” and is said to have been carved by Israel Allen, a former Revolutionary War soldier.

The Poet

Karen Warinsky’s most recent works appear in the 2019 Mizmor Anthology, and her first poetry collection Gold in Autumn was released in June of 2020. Warinsky has previously published several pieces including two poems through the Montreal International Poetry Contest, a memoir about her grandmother in the book Dear Nana, poems in the anthology Nuclear Impact: Broken Atoms in Our Hands, as well as works in literature magazines including Blue Heron, and Light; a Journal of Photography and Poetry. Warinsky is a retired reporter/high school English teacher who lives in Connecticut 

Next poem: Grave Goods by Melanie Giles