Three Yards Up The Road Poem by Charlotte Peters Rock

When your great-great-Grandmother
sold across the brush of cotton
was singing songs of Africa
and working under lash and lock
and yoke the white man slaver set
the child in England shivered

Silently as Dada died or Mama died
she moved to separation from her own
became a Parish burden picking oakum
was sold to northern mills in groups of slaves
locked inside forbidding winter temples
stocking dross the Parish sent away

When your great-great-Grandmother
sold by stronger tribes in Africa
to make them rich and build their acres
to feed the rich man's people hunger
passing cramped across the ocean
watching daily deaths - or hourly

the child in England shivered
Wearing worn out summer clothing
shoeless in the depths of winter
working fourteen hours unstopping
Hunger semi-slaked by gruel slops
in mills where childhood took a beating

When your great-great-Grandmother
had her babies traded from her
on plantations where the working time was long
and overseers beat and sometimes killed
and raped and pillaged every woman
drunken eyes could squander

the beaten child devoid of mother
dragged a body dwarfed by starving
mis-shapen from the broken bones untreated
locked inside her working prison
sealed at night with others in a tomb
where straw - and other ill-used bodies - comforted

And you can say and lift your head
When my great-great-Grandmother
was taken out of Africa by white men
she ceased her African-African slavery
began her slavery to white men
Then you turn and call me racist

And I have nothing more to say
except my great-great-Grandmother
having parents dead or starving
was a burden on the Parish of her birth
which sold her into untold desolation
in a country which pretended to be kind
and left her slave and starving
as a cog inside an Empire
where the rich grew richer still
on the blood of starving children
out of Africa or three yards up the road