The House Slave
by Rita Dove
The first horn lifts its arm over the dew lit grass
and in the slave quarters, there is a rustling.
Children are bundled into aprons, cornbread and water gourds grabbed a salt pork breakfast taken.
I watch them driven into the vague before dawn while heir mistress sleeps like an ivory toothpick
and Massa dreams of Asses rum and slave funk.
I cannot fall asleep again.
At the second horn the whip curls across the backs of the laggards. Sometimes my sister’s voice, unmistaken, among them
Oh Pray she cries Oh Pray.
Those days I lie on my cot, shivering in the early
heat, and as the fields unfold to whiteness ,
and they spill like bees
among the fat flowers,
I weep.
It is not yet daylight.