1
   WHO are you, dusky woman, so ancient, hardly human,
   With your woolly-white and turban'd head, and bare bony feet?
   Why, rising by the roadside here, do you the colors greet?

                                   2
   ('Tis while our army lines Carolina's sand and pines,
   Forth from thy hovel door, thou, Ethiopia, com'st to me,
   As, under doughty Sherman, I march toward the sea.)

                                   3
   Me, master, years a hundred, since from my parents sunder'd,
   A little child, they caught me as the savage beast is caught;
   Then hither me, across the sea, the cruel slaver brought.

                                   4
   No further does she say, but lingering all the day,                
   Her high-borne turban'd head she wags, and rolls her darkling eye,
   And curtseys to the regiments, the guidons moving by.

                                   5
   What is it, fateful woman--so blear, hardly human?
   Why wag your head, with turban bound--yellow, red and green?
   Are the things so strange and marvelous, you see or have seen?