It is true, that even in the best-run state Such things will happen; it is true,
What’s done is done.
The law, whereby we hate Our hatred, sees no fire in the flue But by the smoke, and not for thought alone It punishes, but for the thing that’s done.
And yet there is the horror of the fact,
Though we knew not the man.
To die in jail,
To be beaten to death, to know the act Of personal fury before the eyes can fail And the man die against the cold last wall Of the lonely world—and neither is that all:
There is the terror too of each man’s thought,
That knows not, but must quietly suspect His neighbor, friend, or self of being taught To take an attitude merely correct;
Being frightened of his own cold image in The glass of government, and his own sin,
Frightened lest senate house and prison wall Be quarried of one stone, lest righteous and high Look faintly smiling down and seem to call A crime the welcome chance of liberty,
And any man an outlaw who aggrieves The patriotism of a pair of thieves.
Howard Nemerov was born on February 29th, 1920 in New York.
He died of cancer at his home in University City,
Missouri on July 5th 1991.
