Combahee Hymn
by A.Z. Foreman
Posted on September 26, 2025
Posted on September 26, 2025
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.