That he was guilty of those fantastic charges
against him has never been adequately proven.
Great jurists have disputed it in huge volumes,
a high court has pardoned his memory, and he,
in one of his embarrassing letters to his son
has said, “O sonny boy, through tears and agony
your loving father proclaims his innocence
of any crime against the hope of man. But we
are always guilty before Their involved laws
because our alibis always contain new crimes,
so pervasive are these laws, and so we lie, —.
and that too is a crime. Kiss mother for me.”
His last speech crystallizes naturally into
free verse: “This is your justice, not mine.
My purpose is to expose its decay. My fate
is to take a small trouble like this, the death
of one man, and enlarge it to a great trouble
capable of hurling you from your high benches.
All my life I have knowingly approached this
disaster, and now I rejoice that it is here.
Because of my love for you I offer you myself
to torture, to kill. My love is my death!
You will husband this wife to man in legends!”
He almost failed, like Jesus, at the last
moment, but recovered in time to forgive
the electrician before the switch closed.
And people thought of him! He was like a radio
no one has noticed until it’s broken and quiet.
For a month the whole system was endangered.
The Administration tried every anodyne it knew;
cabinet scandal, draft, deportation of aliens,
a Federal Theatre Project. Finally only a war
with the neighboring savages could expunge him.
He had known all that. (The uncanny foresight
amazed his secret readers to tears and homage.)
He had said, in the awful style so typical
of his early work, “What is needed is a Society
of Martyrs, one of whom to Die each month every
month, or each Day if need be, to defeat them.
The People are slow to rise, but that they rise,
in the presence of magnificent enough Examples,
I wager my entire Life, Future, Hope and Self!”
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