This the place of recovery
This is where she began
Amharic text reminds us,
As we live beneath the sun,
She was a warrior,
An Amazon on the run.

Who, when sky was black as gold,
Was dragged across the sunless sea
By men without a soul:
Her stories and narrations,
Her lives as yet untold.

From slave ships and from factories
Amidst the stinking heat
We hear the triump of wizened men:
Men who'd never seen the sun;
Nor wonders do behold.

Gobeen men and counters,
These misers of the heart,
Their fractured souls’ inheritance
Is to live their lives apart
From this Abyssinian maid,
They swore was in her grave.

Such long and false forgetting,
Of moones and seas and sunne,
Is lifted by the light of night:
In the heart where songs begun
Of damsels rare and golden,
Who sing on Mount Amara:
As Coleridge once foretold;

In times of old..