1619
By Philip Kolin
Arrival of enslaved Africans in Virginia in August, Jamestown Colony
Some twenty odd of us kidnapped
by the Portuguese, then transported
under slave decks by the White Lion
to Port Comfort. The sorrow of color
bondage shipped from the old world
to the new. Jamestown, birthplace
of a nation, blackened by our moans;
we feared white words and faces
and the cold sun that rose over
our chained future here. Time did not
set us free. Our lives and limbs slaved
to crop the bounty of a white harvest--
cotton, sugar, rice. Freedom plowed
under in tobacco fields; our hard labor
gone up in the smoke of history.
Our legacy hardly acknowledged
even when Queen Elizabeth II came
to celebrate the three hundred and fiftieth
anniversary of this settlement. The state
dinner in Richmond promoted it as
a white tie affair.
Philip C. Kolin is the Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus and former Editor of the Southern Quarterly at the University of Southern Mississippi. He has published over 40 books including 15 collections of poetry. Among these are Emmett Till in Different States: Poems and Reaching Forever:Poems.
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