Contribution by Penelope Scambly Schott
A Narrative Poem
"The Story of the Half-Scalped Woman."
The Savage Native Here About
They come with fishing nets and weapons, bow and arrows over the shoulder and a stone axe tucked at the belt. Three, tall and well formed, all young, their heads shaven, except a feather center crest. . First they see the broken boat stuck on the shallow bar, and speak among themselves, and now see us. Swift butchers. First my husband: An axe to his back. He groans once and falls. The loose and reddening sand. Now three upon me. Fast. Each to destroy. My belly axed open, my arm nearly off, my hair yanked back and haf cut away form my skull, and the sea and the sky turn black and black and black and nothing at all. Moonrise over the wretched spar: With one arm I gather my glistening guts and crawl toward a hollow tree, and I see one start. |
Penelope Scambly Schott
Schott is a feminist poet and former professor of English at Raritan Valley Community College and Rutgers University. She has published several books of poetry and has taught poetry writing for Thomas Edison State College. This brilliant tour-de-force narrates the life of a woman shipwrecked in the 1640s on the shores of modern-day New Jersey, axed in the belly, half-scalped and left for dead by the Lenape Indians, then nursed back to health by them and taken into the tribe. And that’s only the beginning. Penelope Scambly Schott is the author of three previous collections of poems, most recently The Perfect Mother, which won the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry. She has also been awarded four fellowships by the New Jersey Council on the Arts. To read about Schott's and learn of her greater body of work, click here.
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