Ascension Island
[7°56´S 14°25´W]
for Leendert Hasenbosch(1695 – 1725?)
The loneliest sin is the greatest treason.
Father and sisters off to Batavia,
half a world away.
Anchored in the Hague [52°5´N 4°19´E],
you fend in that wilderness
Cruise those sooty streets and sullen corridors Silence at every encounter
Survival requires adaptation.
You are a soldier, writer, bookkeeper
Scrawling accounts for final tally
All will be reconciled at the audit.
Set sail for the Dutch East Indies [6°125´S 106°49´E],
passage bought and paid for
How did you err, what clue revealed your predilection?
Betrayed by a fellow
Caught in the act
Or merely an errant glance at your man Friday?
No matter, justice will be done
in the company’s slave port of Cape Town, no less [33°55´S 18°25´E].
Cast away twenty-five-hundred nautical miles to
a treeless cinder, lava cooled but little else
as if Elba and St. Helena were too close for your kind
and you the more feared invader.
Water water everywhere, and only blood to drink,
after the albatross and turtle, a man consumes himself.
No bones lay blanched by solar bleakness
only an emaciated
diary where you confess
your mortal sin, and beg
not forgiveness, only
Mercy
A clean, gentle death.
So it was that heaven had its vengeance and sodomy punish’d
If only heaven was more forgiving, could you
have ascended and been given a seat,
not at the right hand,
but with His whores and thieves?
No man is an island, indeed.
Except those castaway and
seared into holy solitude.