Lucía M. Polis The Poetry of

Out of a tall window opened to the city square
watches wearily the redcaped magistrate
as the men bring in the beams of the gallows,
put them together, painstakingly and fondly.

By noon, a sizeable crowd gathers.
The magistrate thinks he can hear
foreign dialects, strange tongues when
they wheel in a woman raving and writhing,

“You have chased me through fields,
thrown stones at my head, muddied
my lustre, but there’s still one thing
you can never muster to take!”

The headsman pays her no mind, carefully
hones his axe with confident strokes.
The condemned woman, one breast
bared by chance, shouts,


“This—my resolve! Don’t dare feign
that you haven’t wished to efface
my ochre apostasy! Welcome all, and rejoice
in this temple built for the commonplace!”

“Hey, you, man in red!” (The magistrate shudders;
how can he be seen?) “I am not yet dead,”
the banshee exclaims through broken teeth,
“It is godly to utter, ‘Not now, not ever’—forever!”

“I have laboured for one score years and eight
to study all I could capture, see, and hold dear.
I will not feed words to your Moloch-machine dawn ’til dusk.
I refuse to be marched t’wards the provision of rapture.”

The magistrate shuts the window,
looks at his clock, feel ornery, lonely.
He begins to uptruss then, for the bloody
forthcoming ceremony, slowly.


Outside, the madwoman’s matted hair floats, glistens.
Somewhere the sentence is read, but the crowd quietly listens:
“Any healthy body must slake her own thirst—
her own cup must be filled to the brim first.”

“She must protect each thing—joy, time, space,
thrust a stake through each vampirical heart
that preys on her time or mind;
she does not owe you a jot.”

The magistrate floats to his assigned spot with a spectral flourish.
There is plenty of time, he decides, nods to the headsman.
The headsman nods back. The sun resumes shining.
The oration continues. The axe sits in its rack.

“Do you remember how for a year I’d welcomed you
into my home to worship—did you pray? I spied
arrival under guise of faith, then nothing but sin and stray.
You came to fraternize, not to encounter God!”


“True faith requires sacrifice!” (The magistrate nods, unconvinced.)
“And rapture must have costly offerings.” (Eyes lower to the ground.)
“What have you given? You gather in the name of banter. I’d sought
compatriots to travel up the mountain, place oblations on the altar.”

The magistrate gives a sign unseen.
The headsman puts a head within the stocks.
Up in the tower chimes twelve times
the ancient clock.

The point of adroitness is precision. No matter how much care
you’ll place in the attempt to listen, you’re guaranteed to miss
the silken filament of headman’s expert swing: (fwoot)—the axe
caresses the air; klump—falls in the basket now the thing.

Those gathered for the spectacle, now past, begin to thin.
The useless thing with bluing lips appears to speak,
eyes open wide. The headsman bends a willing ear
and hears, “...no. I shall not abide.”