Dido like the queen of Carthage

As Belle as Helen of Troy,

Who could hide a beauty so coy

When guests dined at Mansfield Manor?

 

Whenever you romped through your estate

A Greek chorus of powdered wigs

From worlds old and new frothed

At the contradiction of your existence

​

You belong to a lineage of lettered half-slaves

From Grandpa of Three Musketeers to Black Mozart

Your propertied fathers ferried you all from Antilles

To metropolis as if it were your North Star

 

In this reversed Middle Passage, you laughed

With your cousin as playmate— not handmaid

And wielded rights denied to your African mother

Yet little of the acceptance given to her naval captor

 

You were poised to grow up an alien on land you

Could only half-claim, child of an unholy union

Never mind your mother named Maria

Whose death marooned you in Britannia

 

Did you find yourself among the servants?

Did you ever mistake the nanny for an auntie?

Drop the feathered turban and bowl of exotics

Lest you become an odalisque's domestic

 

Waters which swept you to the mainland

Drowned truths from your native land

And carried rumors of your upbringing

To men who would face their undoing

 

If the peculiar trade were ever abolished

To them, you governed your great uncle

At the age of ten and freed chattel reared

With a whisper in his judging ear

 

Your face launched not a thousand civil suits

Yet your grace was an affront to the white race

Gilded dress and pearled neck emboldened

Your dotted dimple and chocolate smize

 

As misbegotten as you were

Heralds of empire could not deny

English elegance in your learned mind

Despite whatever laws left you bind

 

From inheriting your mother’s blight

To acquiring your sires’ wealth

Your transformation from slave to heiress

Is, among rags-to-riches stories, the fairest

 

Had you stayed in the Caribbean plots

And lived amongst Maria’s lot

Could you imagine, as you laid dying,

Liberty in a Black nation rising?