Page:Poems that every child should know (ed. Burt, 1904).djvu/384

346 My eyes settle the land, I bend at her prow or shout joyously from the deck.

The boatman and clam-diggers arose early and stopt for me,

I tucked my trouser-ends in my boots and went and had a good time;

You should have been with us that day round the chowder-kettle.

The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside,

I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile,

Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and weak,

And went where he sat on a log and led him in and assured him,

And brought water and fill'd a tub for his sweated body and bruis'd feet,

And gave him a room that entered from my own, and gave him some coarse clean clothes,

And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness,

And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles;

He staid with me a week before he was recuperated and passed north,

I had him sit next me at table, my firelock lean'd in the corner.

I am the poet of the woman the same as the man,

And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,