Hunt Hawkins

Daniel Whipped at the Market, St. Augustine, 1849

What makes memory?
Tourists on trolleys are told only
about Ripley’s two-headed cow,
the Fountain of Youth, Flagler’s hotels,
and the old open pavilion on the Plaza
where fish and flowers were sold.

The Confederate Ladies Memorial Auxiliary
in 1872 placed on the Plaza an obelisk
keeping alive the names of their fallen,
all forty-six, chiseled in stone,
yielding slowly to the elements
amid autumn’s turning leaves.

Forty-two years before Jamestown,
Admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés
arrived to found America’s first city,
bringing Africans to cut wood, grow food,
build a fort of seashells, and dump
slaughtered French soldiers in the bay.

Young Ralph Waldo Emerson, tubercular, came
south to cure his cough and saw on the Plaza
four children bought without their mother.
Much later, thirty-nine lashes etched
Daniel’s jellied flesh, the escaped property
of Antonio Bourke. That’s all records say.

Author: Hunt Hawkins

Hunt Hawkins has published a book of poems The Domestic Life with the University of Pittsburgh Press where it won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize and individual poems in many journals including Poetry, The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, Tri-Quarterly, and Poet Lore. He served as English Department Chair at Florida State University and the University of South Florida and has been President of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association.

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