Combahee Hymn

June 2, 1863

We poled through silt and dusk, the water’s hush

As tight as prayer between the cypress knees.

Each reed, each frog-slick log, each sudden thrush

Seemed privy to the gush of destinies.

The stars, those abolitionist white eyes,

Looked down and winked us forward, bold and grave.

She stood abaft—no sword, no battle cries—

But the still fire of one who came to save.

No Moses ever knew the swamps so well.

She read the tide like scripture, moved with care,

A conjure-woman swaggering out of hell,

Dragging God’s wrathful mandate through the air.

I held my musket close. The thought of chains

Still pinched my wrists, though they were months undone.

But here we came with rifles, not with chains,

To make the South’s blood face what it had done.

They burned the rice. We watched the children cry

To mothers who could scarcely clutch them fast.

But as the keelboats split the dragonfly-

-strewn river, none looked back upon the past.

We were the past returning, not in shame

But justice, black and booted, gun in hand,

To take what history could never claim

Was freely given by this stolen land.

And I recall how Harriet’s voice took wing.

A hymn? A whisper? No, a kind of bell

That rang us northward, out of anything

That slavery had tried to make us spell.

Freedom, she said, and it was not a word

But something real, and heavy as a child.

We bore them all. No lash, no lord, no sword

Could stop the river once the river smiled.

About the poet

A. Z. Foreman is a linguist, poet, short story author and/or translator pursuing a doctorate at the Ohio State University. His work has been featured in The Threepenny Review, ANMLY, Rattle, The Los Angeles Review and elsewhere including two people's tattoos but not yet The Starfleet Academy Quarterly or Tattooine Monthly. He writes from the edge of thought between sleep and waking. He wants to pet your dog.