There is a plaque in the grass for Increase, and Cotton. Pretend it drizzles and a man in an ugly plastic poncho circles the Mathers, all but sniffing the air warily. Children come with thin paper and charcoal to touch you. Pretend I see it in the stone, with a gruesome cherub. Foremother, your name is the boat that brought you. Yusef Komunyakaa is a poet whose books include “The Emperor of Water Clocks” and “Neon Vernacular,” for which he received the Pulitzer Prize. Who made soldiers fear for their lives, & at day’s end only two would pay with the branding of their thumbs.
& an echo of the future rose over the courtroom as John Adams defended the Brits, calling the deadĪ “motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes & mulattoes, Irish teagues & outlandish jacktars,” They had laid a foundering stone for the Minutemen at Lexington & Concord, first to defy & die, Tore his chest, blood reddening snow on King Street, March 5, 1770, first to fall on captain’s command.įive colonists lay for calling hours in Faneuil Hall before sharing a grave at the Granary Burying Ground. Wind deviled cold air as he stood leaning on his hardwood stick, & then two lead bullets How often had he walked, gazing down at gray timbers of the wharf, as if to find a lost copper coin? Harpooner & rope maker, he never dreamt a pursuit of happiness or destiny, yet ralliedīeside patriots who hurled a fury of snowballs, craggy dirt-frozen chunks of ice, & oyster shellsĪt the stout flank of redcoats, as the 29th Regiment of Foot aimed muskets, waiting for fire! Diagram: Getty Images.Īfrican & Natick blood-born known along paths up & down Boston Harbor, escaped slave, A cavalcade of ghost ships wash their hands of all they carried.Ĭlint Smith is a doctoral candidate at Harvard University and the author of the poetry collection “Counting Descent,” as well as a forthcoming nonfiction book, “How the Word Is Passed.” Photo illustration by Jon Key. The soft hum of history spins on its tilted axis. I slide my ring finger from Senegal to South Carolina & feel the ocean separate a million families. I drag my thumb from Ghana to Jamaica & feel the weight of dysentery make an anvil of my touch. I pull my index finger from Angola to Brazil & feel the bodies jumping from the ship. My hand across the bristled hemispheres, but grow weary of chasing a history that swallowed me.įor every hundred people who were captured & enslaved, forty died before they ever reached the New World. I try to keep count how many times I drag My finger back & forth between the fragile continents. Over the course of 350 years, 36,000 slave ships crossed the Atlantic Ocean.
0 kommentar(er)
