Another Strange Land: Downpour off Cape Hatteras (March, 1864)

                          for my ancestor

                          in the Pennsylvania 25th Colored Infantry

                          aboard the Suwanee

First a penny-sized hole in the hull

                     then eager saltwater rushing over

    us and clouds swirling and clotting

            the moonlight—no time to stop and look upon it

as the hole becomes an iron mouth,

    makes strange sounds, peels and tears

                        open iron as iron should not open—

muffled and heavy         us becoming underwater

                     we confused the metal echo and thunder

         as the same death knell from God’s mouth—

we been done           floated all this way down 

           in dark blue used

      uniforms, how far from slavers’ dried-out fields

in Virginia, Pennsylvania—wherever

                                         we came from now we   

         barely and only

                    see and hear an ocean

                                        whipped into storm

not horror, not glory, but storm

                   not fear, not power, but focus

             on the work of breathing, living as the storm

rocks us and our insides upside down        turns

                   hard tack into empty nausea—

                 so close to death I thought I saw the blaze-

            sick fields of Berryville again, the curling fingers

                             of tobacco, hurt fruit and flower—

                      but no, but         no.

             I say no to death now. I’m nobody’s slave

                                    now. I’m alive     and not alone,

one of those      who escaped and made    myself

                 a soldier a weapon a stone in David’s sling

       riding the air above the deep. I grow more dangerous

to those who want me. I ain’t going back

                                 to anywhere I been before.

                 I grab a bucket. You grab a bucket. We the 25th

       Pennsylvania Colored Infantry, newly formed

                            and too alive and close to free

          to sink below this midnight water. 36 hours—chaos

shoveling-lifting-throwing       ocean back into ocean

                         to reach land and war in the Carolinas. 

       I stole my body back       from death and going down

                        more than once. I steal my breath

           tonight and every night      I will not drown.