FOR THE HONOR OF MASSACHUSETTS
Allinson, Brent Dow
For the Honor of Massachusetts By BRENT DOW ALLINSON Take them, by night, from Dedham to the chair! Take them and burn them living in the lair Of Vengeance men call Justice. If you will: These...
...Is this sick nightmare but a poet's dream— Or is it fact and fateful history?— Judge, Massachusetts, or be dumb...
...Turn bolts and keys upon them, strap them down...
...Do the eyes of Pity bleed...
...raise Their smoking muskets and hot wars of words...
...but that Justice died Upon that legal lethal chair In the befouled New England air Where the cold Atlantic rolls'.— Say that on the bloody scrolls Of the State's exalted past This fell murder was the last...
...what rewards...
...Gag them and hood them, blind them from the day And yoke them with the dreadful volts of Hell Have they not murdered...
...Thus the Daemoniac, ad Patriam, ad nauseam: O, State, thrice holy State, Thy will be done!— Vengeance is thine, and statute, force and praise...
...I live...
...Lincoln, what a sham...
...Hsverford, Penn...
...Were prophets heard in Israel today What crowns would fall, O, Jehu...
...From his Rosina's face has passed the bloom He loved, and orphaned children seek his face In vain, yet those steel gates that on him close Will rust, their hinges crumble in their place Before her loyalty will lose Its loving strength, or cease To cry for his release,— Before their faith and hope Will faint or fail to grope Hereafter for the Justice here denied...
...Stop your fine ears, summon a maundering priest To add his sacred unction to your own: And when grey morning signals in the east— Grey as the prison-kneaded faces—rise...
...Thus speaks a human heart no guile can chill, Nor all that Massachusetts' hatred knows Can crush one drop of venom from, a rose...
...The truth you cannot kill...
...Since when were courts the thrones of Liberty, Or juries' eyes the clearest tyes that see?— What did they once in Salem by the Sea...
...We want none of their theoretic whine!— Teach them their business and a certain fear Of God, or send them back to Italy...
...Say truly, are things what they seem...
...The courts can do no wrong...
...O, hapless Governor, twice-wretched man...
...Take them, my lords, to Charlestown to the chair— Take and burn them living in the lair Of Vengeance you call Justice, if you will: These twain you may—Lo...
...No longer v.n official, but a man Alone before his conscience and his God Breathing in fear—O, awful doubt and death!— And dreadful cold immitigable deed— HIS deed that makes of sentient flesh a clod Rent by the savage State's insensate-claws— HIS death, and crime of lawyers and of laws...
...Here where no vegetation lives...
...Since when was Truth secure, where lawyer...
...July 12, 1927...
...at your peril—kill...
...Of Freedom, Mercy and Fraternity, And with a graceful heart shall live—or die— For the noble legion of Humanity . . ." Thus Sacco, after seven years of doom...
...And ye who hold the mirrors of the age— When you reflect these deeds upon the page Say not that Sacco...
...Well, who can tell?— They are not fit to live who talk that way...
...Here where no sunlight comes I breathe and dream Of justice for the wretched of this earth...
...Was Dred Scott's freedom ransomed by a court...
...Have not a hundred juries gone astray...
...Or John Brown's justice silenced by a fort...
...My excellent Governor, from your troubled bed And gaze into the mirror on the wall: Lo...
...And on that Common where your State House looms What madness once prepared what fury dooms...
...If you will: These twain you can consume...
...And all the glory underneath the sun . . . But to the weak—Ah...
...God save us...
...What an apparition meets your eyes!— Behind that mask, to peace and pity dead, A hand of Fate emerging from a pall Seizes a switch and closes silently . . . Electric tigers tear through human limbs Leap to the sky and crash across the earth In long reverberations . . . Suddenly The hand sinister points and threatens, dims— And disappears, leaving the glassy girth Frosted with my lord Governor's exhaled breath...
...the courtly cry, "What right have they to bray of Freedom here— Two ranting dago aliens who have come To live and labor in prosperity Among our Pharaoh's happy fatted kine...
Vol. 19 • August 1927 • No. 8
