Poem of the Week - ‘Anne Bonny to Mary Read: Pirate’ by Lisa Rodgers

Pirate

There was no mistaking you
Though you tried to drown
Your beauty in a frown 
Swore to swagger over your poise
To salt your arias to the gulls
I could see the lightness in you.

I saw you weep when the turtle’s
Blood moaned about your feet.
When a lashing took an eye,
Your stare searched the dumb horizon for pity.
When you reeled, giddy in the yardarms,
I watched your delight escape in rips of cloud.

I will keep your secret 
Until I no longer love you:
When the sepulchral call of the midnight whales
Has stolen your charity,
And the dominion of fist and foot
Sits like a cockroach at the corner of your smile.

Rodgers’ The She Chronicles (available for purchase on our website) is made up of poems from the perspectives of extraordinary but often marginalised women from history. Astoundingly genuine and heartfelt, each poem reads like a confession from the likes of Dido Belle, Mary Shelley, and Anne Bonny in the above poem, Pirate.