James Wright
& # 8211 ; Online Poems Essay, Research Paper
At The Executed Murderer & # 8217 ; s Grave
Why should we make this? What good is it to us?
Above all, how can we make such a thing?
How can it perchance be done? & # 8211 ; Freud
I.
My name is James A. Wright, and I was born
Twenty-five stat mis from this infected grave,
In Martins Ferry, Ohio, where one slave
To Hazel-Atlas Glass became my male parent.
He tried to learn me kindness. I return
Merely in memory now, aloof, unhurried,
To dead Ohio, where I might lie buried,
Had I non run off before my clip.
Ohio caught George Doty. Clean as calcium hydroxide,
His skull putrefactions empty here. Dying & # 8217 ; s the best
Of all the humanistic disciplines work forces learn in a dead topographic point.
I walked here one time. I made my loud show,
Leaning for linguistic communication on a dead adult male & # 8217 ; s voice.
Now sick of prevarications, I turn to confront the yesteryear.
I add my easy greivance to the remainder:
II.
Doty, if I confess I do non love you,
Will you allow me alone? I burn for my ain prevarications.
The darks electrocute my runaway,
My head. I run like the baffled mad
At St. Clair Sanitarium, who lurk,
Arch and cunning, under the maple trees,
Pleased to be playing guilty after dark.
Gazing to bed, they croon self-lullabies.
Doty, you make me ill. I am non dead.
I croon my cryings at 50 cents a line.
III.
Idiot, he demanded love from misss,
and murdered 1. Besides, he was a stealer.
He left two adult females and a shade with kid.
The hair, foul as a Canis familiaris & # 8217 ; s upon his caput,
Made such disgusting Ohio animate beings
Fitter for puke than a sort adult male & # 8217 ; s heartache.
I waste no commiseration on the dead that malodor,
And no love & # 8217 ; s lost between me and the weeping
Drunkards of Belaire, Ohio, where constabulary
Kick at their kidneys till they die of drink.
Jesus may reconstruct them whole, for all of me.
Alive and dead, those tittering muckers who
Saddled my incubuss thirty old ages ago
Can make without my widely printed sighing
Over their strivings with paid earnestness.
I do non feel for the dead, I pity the death.
IV.
I pity myself, because a adult male is dead.
If Belmont County killed him, what of me?
His victims ne’er loved him. Why sh
ould we?
And yet, cipher had to kill him either.
It does no good to court the grass, to veil
The quicklime hole of a adult male & # 8217 ; s licking and shame.
Nature-lovers are gone. To hell with them.
I kick the balls off, and talk my name.
V.
This grave & # 8217 ; s gash suppurating sores. Maybe it will mend,
When all are caught with what they had to make
In fright of love, when every adult male stands still
By the last sea,
And the princes of the sea come down
To put away their robes, to judge the Earth
And its dead, and we dead stand assailable everyplace,
And my organic structures & # 8211 ; male parent and kid and unskilled felon & # 8211 ;
Laughably kneel to bare my cicatrixs,
My mousing offenses, to God & # 8217 ; s pitiless stars.
VI.
Gazing courteously, they will non tag my face
From any liquidator & # 8217 ; s, buried in this topographic point.
Why should they? We are nil but a adult male.
VII.
Doty, the raper and liquidator,
Sleeps in a ditch of fire, and can non hear ;
And where, in Earth or snake pit & # 8217 ; s unhallowed peace,
Men & # 8217 ; s self-destructions will halt, God knows, non I.
Angels and pebbles mock me under trees.
Earth is a door I can non even face.
Order be damned, I do non desire to decease,
Even to maintain Belaire, Ohio, safe.
The danders on my cervix are fright, non heartache.
( Open, keep! Open roof of the land! )
I hear the last sea in the Ohio grass,
Heaving a tide of grey disastrousness.
Wrinkles of winter ditch the decayed face
Of Doty, slayer, idiot, and stealer:
Soil of my flesh, defeated, belowground.
1963
Online Beginning: hypertext transfer protocol: //www.it.cc.mn.us/literature/grave.html
Get downing
The Moon drops one or two plumes into the Fieldss.
The dark wheat listens.
Be still.
Now.
There they are, the Moon & # 8217 ; s immature, seeking
Their wings.
Between trees, a slender adult female lifts up the lovely shadow
Of her face, and now she steps into the air, now she is gone
Wholly, into the air.
I stand entirely by an senior tree, I do non make bold breathe
Or move.
I listen.
The wheat leans back toward its ain darkness,
And I lean toward mine.
Online Beginning: hypertext transfer protocol: //www.palace.net/~llama/poetry/beginning