For several years every baby born on St Kilda died within 8 days. The St Kildans thought they were cursed. They did not know it was tetanus until a nurse from Glasgow discovered that it was due to the fulmar's oil the mid-wife would rub on the umbilical cord. This oil was stored in bags made from the stomachs of gannets who were infected.
I tell my husband I am pregnant and he sets out to make a tiny coffin (1891).
I choose a name: Mhairi or Callum.
He searches the tide-wrack daily for driftwood.
He forbids me to make clothes
But I make sheets for the coffin-crib.
There will be clean linen until the last
while I will rock and croon to my babe
for the few blessed days of its life.
It is God’s will. I shut out imaginings:
the fourth or fifth night,
when the babe gives up sucking;
the seventh, clenched gums,
even for my finger dipped in water.
I am knitting a shawl of such intricacy,
nothing so beautiful will have been seen before.
Stephanie Green
Published in ‘Northwords Now.’
I wrote these poems some time ago but I hope they are of interest now. during the pandemic, 2020. Two poems about an epidemic on the island of St Kilda ( Scotland) in the 19th century.
Tetanus Infantum or the Eight Day Death
I wait in the earth for the beak of the gannet
then lurk in the dark of its stomach.
I am the homunculus with the oleaginous grin,
who swims in this bag.
When the mid-wife anoints her rag in the oil
and binds it round the baby's cord,
I'll give it eight days
before I'm back in the soil.
(Published in ‘Butcher’s Dog’.)