Harriet Tubman Poem by Mark Heathcote

She carried those scars in her fractured skull
praying to God makes him change his ways,
she'd pray simultaneously for the improbable,
pray for freedom, and that of her family always.

Her hair which had never been combed
stood out like a bushel basket, and it had saved her
when she was hired out: hit by a metalweight
she thanked the Lord and blessed her faith.

Her unrelenting master wanted her quick sale
‘People came to look at me; he was trying to sell me.'
But, as such and such, no sale did prevail;
‘injury had caused her a temporal-lobe-epilepsy.'

‘She changed her prayer, ‘she said. ‘First of March
I began to pray, ‘Oh Lord,
if you aren't ever going to change that man's heart,
kill him, Lord, and take him out of the way.'

She even prayed all night for her master's death
for her own ‘Liberty or death,
‘if I could not have one, I would have the other.'
‘Harriet Tubman confessed to a negro brother.'

The Lord answered Brodess died a week later.
She ascribed to visions and revelations from God.
‘I was a stranger in a strange land, ‘she said later.
When she escaped into her freedom's esplanade;

Tubman travelled by night, guided by the North Star,
when winter, the nights are long and dark.
Avoiding slave catchers, she said, in coded song.
Farewell. ‘I'll meet you in the morning, ‘Mary

fellow slaves ‘I'm bound for the promised land.'

She carried a revolver and was not afraid to use it.
she made many journeys forth and back
to free other, folk she always came in the winter
when nights were long and impenetrably dark.

When morale sank guided by the North Star,
and when one man insisted on going back to the plantation,
she pointed a gun at his head and then said.
‘You go on or die. I never ran my train off-
the track and, I never lost a passenger.

‘I'm bound only for the promised land.'