Ethiopia Saluting the Colors.

1

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?



2

(’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.)



3

Me, master, years a hundred, since from my parents sunder’d,

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

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



4

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.



5

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?