1
WHO are you, dusky woman, so ancient, hardly human,
With your woolly-white and turband head, and bare bony feet?
Why, rising by the roadside here, do you the colors greet?
2
(Tis while our army lines Carolinas sand and pines,
Forth from thy hovel door, thou, Ethiopia, comst to me,
As, under doughty Sherman, I march toward the sea.)
3
Me, master, years a hundred, since from my parents sunderd,
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 turband head she wags, and rolls her darkling eye,
And curtseys to the regiments, the guidons moving by.
5
What is it, fateful womanso blear, hardly human?
Why wag your head, with turban boundyellow, red and green?
Are the things so strange and marvelous, you see or have seen?
Ethiopia Saluting the Colors.
written byWalt Whitman
© Walt Whitman