The Sailor's Wife by Rebecca Weigold

The Message, by Gerard Terboch (Netherlands), 1660.

The Sailor's Wife

Her velvet Dutch jacket
sapphire as the North Sea
does not soften the news.
She is stoic for him
who delivers letters
to wives whose husbands
perish at sea in the
Anglo-Dutch War.
She gently turns
the mirror face down,
unties her linen cap,
allows a cluster of tears and
russet curls to fall freely.
The tavern maids grudgingly
serve the English messenger
tankards of ale.
The Dutchmen sneer and taunt
while he seeks to drown what
the sea dispatches.

Rebecca Weigold

Rebecca Weigold's poems have appeared in Black River Review, Perceptions, Up Against the Wall, Mother, and other publications. In 1987, she founded/published The Cincinnati Poets' Collective, an annual poetry journal which featured the work of poets for a decade.