Another Strange Land: Downpour off Cape Hatteras - Aaron Coleman

[Larry Robinson]

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


	for my ancestor
	in the Pennsylvania 25tth 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.

	- Aaron Coleman
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