Pamela Annas

Islands

PUBLISHED IN FOLIO 2025: VOL. 40.

i.
From the ocean’s point of view,
an interruption. On Nantucket
where land costs ten million dollars
per acre, the Atlantic laughs
all winter, pounding at the center.
Each spring, the island is smaller
though in miserly recompense
a bit of sand is dropped at either end.
Someday, say a hundred years from now,
there will be one long sandy ridge sliding
into the sea, then nothing. In the long run,
an island is not a good investment.

ii.
Things have changed since Donne wrote,
four hundred years ago, “No man (sic) is an island.”
Everyone I know is an island and furthermore
we’re forgetting how to swim and build boats,
each of us developing a civilization
insular with its own customs, language
and beliefs, more eccentric as the years pass.
Soon, like Darwin’s finches, we’ll be
separate species. I’m almost sixty
and am told that this is maturity: to accept
that we are each and every one of us alone.
I said to a friend, what about love?
She said, “I rely on my vibrator.
As long as there’s no power failure,
I’m fine.”

Pamela Annas grew up in the Navy, lived for two years in a village in Türkiye and graduated from high school in Yokohama, Japan. She is Professor Emerita of English at UMass/Boston where she taught working-class literature, modern and contemporary poetry and writing, coached UMB’s ballroom dance team and directed its English MA Program. She is a member of the editorial collective and poetry editor at Radical Teacher, and has published books and articles on poetry, literature, and pedagogy, and poems in various journals and anthologies. Her chapbook Mud Season was published by Červená Barva Press.