My Fathers Car

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Blown by Atlantic wind and sail in chains 
  once were ragged souls like chattels branded -
from the Guinea Coast to old Port of Spain
  African herdsmen on slave ships landed.
From my father’s car I saw the cane yields
  where men of burden would cut, burn, and mash,
where woman and child stooping in the fields
  saw the ripping flesh and heard the whips lash.
Now broke are those fetters through time and fate -
  that dark tyranny of a forepassed age,
like the ships of old and their human freight
  hunted, sold, and transported in a cage.
In that old grey Plymouth Fury I swear
I saw ghosts of the mills and the ploughshare.


            Written: December 2009

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