Frederick Douglass

A Tapestry Poem

The Frederick Douglass Statue at the New York Historical Society Richard Hedrick on Unsplash

I love
your mind, Frederick,
a filigree of words
weaned off the baby delivered
into enslavement and severed
from its mother —
your birthright with no delivery date.

I marvel
at how you learned to read
and write feeling with your hands
the marks, letter by letter,
the shipbuilders carved
on the timber of their boats
— ‘S’ for starboard, ‘L’ for larboard -
and floated them upon your lips.

Your accurate sense of observation cradled
in the affliction only you could describe —
the pain of loss, the pain of oppression
and cruelty lived, witnessed
and signed with the scars on your back.

How astutely you reached for the light
of knowledge and grasped it —
absorbing speech and nuances
through your scrutiny and clinical
dissection of injustice and exploitation.