Frederick Douglass Writes to President Lincoln
I.
If we act not ruthless now,
Rebels will be pitiless later.
Grant each foe a piercing kiss
of bayonet—
goad entrails outta Dixie bellies—
while cannon balls execute skyward strikes,
but rain down,
splashing through enemy fat.
We must impose frosts, blights, on the South,
so grey-clad men turn as pacific as cattle butchered,
and a dizzying hush staggers every Confederate
church, legislature, and market,
arresting the progress of this nineteenth-century:
Mr. President,
Every southern plantation must turn a cemetery.
II.
No more blushing sonnets about Southern belles.
No! Let Dixie be a worm in a bird’s beak—
our Northern Hawk’s beak,
and ebony Americans set at liberty
with a ton of Apology—
and a ton of bullion
(gold bullion)—
yes, twenty tons of gold bullion—
Mr. President!—
twenty tons,
and no shirking.
The Southern pastures and profits
are proceeds of Slave Labour,
and the ex-slaves, now the children of Yearning,
must have satisfied their hearts’ certificates—
if their accounts and physiques
will flourish as healthy as summer.
A cow and two sheep and ten acres—
or even forty acres and a mule—
can’t suffice for efficient, auspicious Economy.
Do not think me extremely dreamy, sir.
Our policy of Negro Emancipation
demands a parasitic immediacy
upon the remaining Rebel (stolen) Wealth—
a scathing politics of not Retribution,
but Redistribution!
III.
Soon, Mr. Lincoln, your loyal Negroes
will unmuzzle Venom.
For now, their speech seems drowsy, lazy,
but they remember squandered mothers,
ransacked girls,
daddies whipped to death,
bent-down shoulders,
meals got from pious scrapings of dirt,
the sour roots they had to gnaw,
their rags as flimsy as air,
and shortly will do all they can—
by whatever means necessary—
to hasten on dessication
for the slavemasters,
and their Damnation too,
so the entire Confederacy
is a dehydrated garden,
a desert.
IV.
Our Negro verse is meat-and-potatoes stuff.
Latin? That’s a talon.
Greek? That’s a wreck.
Our tongues and teeth pick apart
slavemasters’ sermons,
until we get to suckle on
slavemasters’ bones.
We serve now as devoted assassins,
but do expect to be mandarins,
giving due direction to the State.
V.
Allow thy pen no shuddering scribbles,
no miniscule sentiments, Abe!
We are in the vicinity of Triumph,
and can proffer no ornamental Government.
Nor does Sherman’s righteous Terror—
his flamboyant blazing of Georgia—
brook senseless Beautification.
To the policy of War,
do not affix a mannequin’s signature—
stilted, irresolute—
but insist that the Confederacy—
for her Obduracy—
dine on her pale sons’ entrails.
Abe, leave no murders uncharged
and unpunished.
Leave the South’s sinister animals—
crippled, broken, bleeding—
and as dead as smashed, toga’d statuary.
[London (Ontario) 13 novembre mmxiv]
