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Valentine 2 (Free verse) by zodiac

(Captain Cook dies in Kealakekua Bay, Hawaii) - After which, we know, the Resolution loosed her carriage guns and muskets on the offending bush; and perhaps, even then, the crew noted the way the fan palms, the lush vine-weave, the acanthaceae bellied like sails, became momentarily more and more-radiant than themselves as they took shells, how their crushed-wet smell reached the ship even before the heat and noise of impact, and were ashamed to let it stop their work, for Cook was dead. And perhaps Clerke turning over his dry bones in a tent pitched on a rock stretch of coast where death and a small girl watched, fretted, took turns pressing their dry hands to his forehead, perhaps he said – to death, the girl couldn’t understand – ‘In our absence they’d made us gods. Who’d traded no less than the ship’s iron nails for bits of skin-touch, native girls.’ And then, ‘Even when the foremastman died, yes, even when Cook himself belched at the feast.’ And then, ‘So absence does.’ Death, nodding in the corner, checked his watch, tented his fingertips, assumed what he assumed was the proper expression, perhaps. The girl touched him again, then hiked back to the camp with meat and tin, his knife – the usual things.

Dental Panic 16-Feb-06/4:31 PM
'then hiked back to the camp
with meat and tin, his knife – the usual things.'

And germs too. "Syphilis, gonorrhea, tubercilosis, and influenza arriving with Captain Cook in 1799, followed by a big typhoid epidemic in 1804 and numerous 'minor'diseases, reduced Hawaii's population from around half a million in 1779 to 84,000 in 1853, the year when smallpox finally reached Hawaii and killed around 10,000 of the survivors."
Sorry, I'm deep into Jared Diamond's 'Guns, Germs and Steel' at the moment.




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