;
From Zina to Henry
He has sent you to
push against the
biting wind. Your mouth
which has brought forth praise
fervent and melodic as rain,
which has pledged obedience
to our living God,
is shivering on a dim
Chicago street-testifying
of the prophet Joseph.
Yes, you are valiant
stalwart, heroic as you
bring the blessings of God
upon our heads.
Miles away my lips
taste the prophet’s skin
moist with salt like the
waters of the Dead Sea.
In a corner of the room
our infant son sucks
his nails into his mouth,
the joints of his three fingers
swallowed up in
dreams of milk and honey.
;
Angela Felsted is a musician, poet, and nature lover. Her work has appeared in issue fifteen of Drown in Your Own Fears, in Chantarelle’s Notebook, and on her blog. Her chap books, CLEAVE and SCARRED were published in 2012, and her edgy young adult romance, CHASTE, was recently released.
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This is beautifully written, pulling at the heartstrings. Thank you. The whole story of Zina and Henry just breaks my heart.
Love.
Angela,
I want to print these words off onto fondant or something and eat them up because this piece is so delicious. The feeling of this is so rich and so real. It brings life to a person who was just swept away by people who hoped she would remain nameless, faceless and forgotten. Keep up the great writing (this is inexile btw!)
Thank you. I’m glad so many people are enjoying the polygamy poems. Makes me think I should write a few more. :-)
This is a really beautiful poem. I wish that it were not so lovely. Zina D. H. Young turned Joseph Smith down when he asked her to be his plural wife. After that she married Henry. About four months later Dina changed her mind and even though she was pregnant with William’s child she told Joseph that she had changed her mind. And then together the three of them decided it would be all right for them them Joseph and Zina to be sealed. After Joseph died at Carthage Henry stood up as proxy for Joseph and they were sealed together for eternity. What happened before that in the poem is very lovely. I just wish it were more historically accurate. Zina’s marriage to Henry did not end she spent his life with him. Later she became Brigham Young’s plural wife.
Mom, I’m not really sure where you’re getting this idea that Joseph was sealed to Zina only after he had died. I mean, whether Joseph and Zina had a sexual relationship is debatable. So in that respect, I think you have a point. That said, Zina and Joseph were married in 1841, three years before Joseph died in Carthage jail. Henry was aware of it. He gave his consent. And the 1841 date is consistently cited in lay man sources like Wikipedia as well as more scholarly sources like Todd Compton’s “In Sacred Lonliness.”
Furthermore, the scene in the poem is within the realm of possibility because Henry was sent on three different missions between 1841 and 1844–one to Tennessee, another to Western New York, and a third to Chicago. So the man was gone a lot of the time. So much of the time, in fact, that he could have easily shared a home with Zina without precluding the kind of scene I wrote about here.
I also think this idea that Zina stayed with Henry for the remainder of his life in a faithful and intimate way is a bit inaccurate. After Joseph died, Zina was married to Brigham Young and had a child with him even though she was still married to Henry. In fact, Henry was sent on a mission to England in 1846 just before Brigham and Zina began living openly as husband and wife. One contemporary source stated that after the Mormons had left Nauvoo and had stopped in Iowa:
“Brigham Young spoke in this wise, in the hearing of hundreds: He said it was time for men who were walking in other men’s shoes to step out of them. ‘Brother Jacobs,’ he says, ‘the woman you claim for a wife does not belong to you. She is the spiritual wife of brother Joseph, sealed up to him. I am his proxy, and she, in this behalf, with her children, are my property. You can go where you please, and get another, but be sure to get one of your own kindred spirit.'”
If we’re going off technicalities, then I suppose we could say that Zina never left Henry since I’m not sure their union was ever formally broken, but if we look at the facts then I think it’s safe to say these two individuals did not have a marriage in the conventional sense and that Zina left Henry in an emotional sense pretty early on in their relationship.
I am not a Mormon, Angela, not even a Christian. But I did find your poem moving, particularly the image of the baby you close with. The sexual intimacy is handled delicately, the taste of sweat. The one suggestion I wish to make is on your simile , the waters of the Dead Sea. I am all for compactness in writing, and I would have said: Dead Sea waters. This halves the number of syllables.
Did I read your comments about the history behind this polygamy poem correctly. I always understood about the polygamous phase in Mormon history, probably one that would have put the church more offside in the USA than any doctrinal issues. But is there implicit in what you say here the idea that a woman may have more than one husband? To my thinking, that would be an equality of the sexes. Though there are societies where the polyandrous pattern rules, I have not heard of both polyandry and polygyny being accepted in the one society.