Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman

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( A Reminiscence of 1864.)

WHO are you, dusky woman, so ancient, hardly human,

With your woolly-white and turban'd head, and bare
bony feet?

Why, rising by the roadside here, do you the colors
greet?

('Tis while our army lines Carolina's sand and pines,

Forth from thy hovel door, thou, Ethiopia, com'st to me,

As, under doughty Sherman, I march toward the sea.)

Me, master, years a hundred, since from my parents sun-
der'd,

A little child, they caught me as the savage beast is caught;

Then hither me, across the sea, the cruel slaver brought .

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No further does she say, but lingering all the day,

Her high-borne turban'd head she wags, and rolls her
darkling eye,

And curtseys to the regiments, the guidons moving by.

What is it, fateful woman—so blear, hardly human?

Why wag your head, with turban bound—yellow, red
and green?

Are the things so strange and marvelous, you see or
have seen?

Lo! Victress on the peaks!

Where thou, with mighty brow, regarding the world,

(The world, O Libertad, that vainly conspired against
thee;)

Out of its countless, beleaguering toils, after thwarting
them all;)

Dominant, with the dazzling sun around thee,

Flauntest now unharm'd, in immortal soundness and
bloom—lo! in these hours supreme,

No poem proud, I, chanting, bring to thee—nor mastery's
rapturous verse;

But a book, containing night's darkness, and blood-
dripping wounds,

And psalms of the dead.

WORLD, take good notice, silver stars fading,

Milky hue ript, weft of white detaching,

Coals thirty-eight, baleful and burning,

Scarlet, significant, hands off warning,

Now and henceforth flaunt from these shores.

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