My Son Will Inventory His Offenses
John Brown, c. 1830, Guys Mills PA
Eight lashes for disobeying his mother, three
for unfaithfulness at work. I take him out
to the tannery I built to compete with my own father’s.
I will only settle one-third of my son’s debt, then remove
my shirt, hand him the whip, say Lay on.
After the first few, I urge him Harder.
John Brown’s Holy War, PBS American Experience Series. Directed by Robert Kenner. Originally aired February 28, 2000. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/brown/
The Story of the Vow
Spring 1832, New Richmond PA
No one knows if or when after
prayer he rose to declare war
on the peculiar institution
to call on his loves to do the same
to kneel and vow with five children and wife
noticeably pregnant with one more
to be stillborn and three days
later herself dead early August
buried with the unnamed
infant in her arms their children
ever after no consensus
on the story of the vow
just that trauma
does things to order
Laughlin-Schultz, Bonne. The Tie that Bound Us: The Women of John Brown’s Family and the Legacy of Radical Abolitionism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013.
The Notion That Suicide Is Painless
A swift and strong six-year-old was the first
to die, then three more on three straight days.
The oldest? Nine. All four now lie
in a little row. Nine of my twenty
children die before they are ten, one
a baby girl who an older sister
accidentally scalded to death.
My Lord, this endless death is catching.
For years, my own steady desire
to be caught and opened, lash
after spilling lash.
Pacifism (1834)
We say education will free your minds and your masters’, who will then free your bodies. Just consider the Latin root: Educare, meaning lead out.
Your changed masters will then freeyou by moral suasion, Christian uplift. Educare, remember, means draw out. It comes from the kingdom of Heaven. Do you buy moral suasion, Christian uplift? We say this is how sin is purged: it comes from the kingdom of Heaven, from the outside in, and the stain is awayed.
We say this is how our sins are purged. We say education will free your minds from the outside in, and the stains are weighed by your bodies. Just consider the root.
Ghazal of John
Tremor me downpour, I cannot turn away from witness, all on fire.
Look near, where your hands can reach, and you can’t help but see a world long fired
in the forge of commerce, a system profane, flesh mathematics, an execution pyre.
That’s how it is. No story. Just false heart, forked tongue, shaded eyes, an empire
of numb and branching senses gorged on rot, spilling themselves across the land entire.
You call for patience, peace, deliberation, but let us not trifle. John will act. Will call down dawnfire.
Contrapuntal Sonnet Ghazal Variation
Eight Questions to an Absent Daughter (1847)
1 What feelings and motives govern her?
2 In what manner does she spend her time?
3 Who are her associates?
4 How does she conduct in word and action?
5 Is she improving generally?
6 Is she provided for with such things as she needs, or is she in want?
7 Does she enjoy herself, or is she lonely and sad?
8 Is she amongst real friends, or is she disliked, and dispised?
Letter to a Son, Teaching in Ohio, 1841
If you cannot now go into a disordered country
school and gain its confidence, & esteem, & reduce it
to good order, & waken up the energies & the verry
soul of every rational being in it yes of every
mean ill behaved, ill governed, snotty boy & girl
that compose it, & secure the good will of the parents,
then how how how are you to stimulate Asses
to attempt a passage of the Alps. If you run
with footmen & they should wery you how should you contend
with horses. If in the land of peace they have wearied you,
then how how how will you do in the swelling of Jordan.
THE BODY OF DANGERFIELD NEWBY (1855)
The man who gazed out the Maryland barn window
30 miles southward into Virginia toward his wife
(whose letter begging him to set her too free rests in
his pocket for him to read and reread every single day)
was the first to be shot by farmers on the rooftops
spraying gunfire down on the armory. His body
was dragged into the gutter and (the source only says)
mutilated. We’re left
imagining just what that means.
Lewis Leary's Death & Daughter
the rocks in the middle—
chased out in the middle of the river.
His weapon wet, inoperable, he was clubbed to death.
Today we rest at The Point, before and after walking
the railroad bridge tunneling the cliffs of Maryland Heights.
We survey this convergence of waters and rock, no one
who lives here savoring this knot of the earth,
only us elsewhere that drink beer on High Street,
raft in the Potomac, fly fish from rocks in the Potomac,
its name itself split by accounts. One: place of great
trade. Another: river of swans. I imagine my father
fishing on the rocks, linger in unknowing why my mother
said this was her father’s favorite place. We make
casual plans to return
spot no scenic recreation on the Shenandoah side
where the Oberlin man waschased his weapon wet, inoperable, and clubbed to death on rocks in the middle of the other
river, the source of its name so many things:
river through the spruces, river of high mountains,
big meadow, silver water, clear daughter of the stars.
Mouth & Hand: His Last Voices (1859)
Mostly filled with attachment and vanity, my life has been of little worth, and I’m yet too young to understand
God. The crimes of this guilty land will never, but with blood, be purged. My hope for otherwise was vanity.
God speaks, Remember them that are in bonds as bound with them. My days on this earth a meek attempt to honor and understand
what the well-off box-in as insanity. I feel no consciousness of guilt. This world craves emptiness, attachment, impunity,
but hung be the heavens in scarlet. Repent that pale-spine spiraling death ladder. Or are you too safe and rich to understand?
I just don’t know about unity, can’t abide how we defile and dishonor the bonds, our deference to vanity. God we’re yet too young to understand.
Their Scaffold Being
Two in the morning, two in the afternoon. No houses, no trees, nothing
there, the raiders could see their own scaffold being built. As they were led there—
two in the morning, two in the afternoon—whites made the enslaved watch. No
houses, no trees, nothing shuts completely. However the eye tries, even
when closed, it still-sees. Which image convinces more? That which is distinct,
that which is outright contrary, or one of symmetry, even
if fearful? The broken clock right twice a day, this life building towards some
death or other, none of it rising like their knowledge of how and when
and where they would die, what they climbed after it climbed the once-Virginia sky.