No sin, Mrs M? God help us! Your latter day

Augustines bouncing up and down

in creaking little cutters of 8 tons

shu\ing from isle to far-flung Ozzie isle

transporting to the dispossessed

infernal bigotries, baptismal bounty,

beautiful services for the dead. Oh, yes,

they read to them about duty

and turning the other cheek, calling it charity …

left behind them useful tracts — absolving whom?

Let's cut the crap, my glib allusions

to Prospero and Caliban. Dispossession

was colonial savagery on a scale

that's even now too great to comprehend.

Would you really say there was no sin?

I'll quote you: the very lowest creatures

in human form … a curiously close

resemblance to pug dogs … all the animal

instinct and adroitness for selfpreservation.

All your bull about native

place names was really dilettante taste

for euphony … like your lines about the sighing

breeze soughing through mossy trees

'midst delicate maidenhair, the rills

wimpling on round island rocks …/

By groves of fragrant sassafras.

How you giggled when dear Charles

did his impersonations of the dispossessed!

Family skeletons are being rattled here,

Louisa Anne, with a bad conscience

you'd call arrogant hindsight and some would

call their hardly bearable history.