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In Crimea, Florence
Nightingale wore a bracelet
woven from her sister’s hair—
now under glass at St. Thomas’s
Hospital in London, the country’s first
school for nurses.
Her mother was angry:
all the suitors she rejected.
She just wanted Florence
to be safe. After the last one—
after all, her daughter was already
29—Florence left town
to escape her mother’s face
whose disappointment
could be read
from left to right like a letter.
She went to Egypt
with Charles and Selena Bracebridge,
traveled in a dahabieh down the Nile,
and her letters home are filled with gratitude
to find herself walking where Moses walked,
under the shade of the date palms.
She wrote in her journal, God called me
in the morning, and asked me would I do good
for him alone without reputation?
Her mind was
agitated.
Above the ungrateful earth
she saw a radiant sky,
where golden light poured
not only from the sun
but from all points
of the transparent blue heavens.
In Egypt, the land of
the Arabian Nights
and the Bible, she stepped to the shore line
of every old assumption.
It was a dark and
powerful river.
Although she felt weak
as an unworthy vessel,
she put her hand to the tiller
to steer.
Poem © Kim Roberts
2004-2005. All rights reserved. |
