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The Creative Response to the Execution of Sacco and
Vanzetti
Fred Ellis
The day a slumbering but awful God,
Before time to eternity is blown,
Examines by the same unyielding rod
These images of His with hearts of stone
These men who do not die, but death decree,
These are the men I should not care to be!
From Not Sacco and Vanzetti
by Countee Cullen
few heard pipes play
if pipes did playin the celebrant air
or any muffled tocsin shake
the sapphire-hearted nights repose
as Massachusetts, comforted,
turned and slept upon her bed . . . .
From Three Men Die (August 23, 1927)
by Lola Ridge
Wine from these grapes I shall be treading surely
Morning and noon and night until I die.
Stained with these grapes I shall lie down to die.
From Wine from These Grapes
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
William Gropper
Thus, Sacco and Vanzetti, may your words
Reverberate through every clime and mart;
There is no other nation but the race;
There is no other country but the heart.
From To Sacco and Vanzetti
by Louis Ginsberg
For if anyone so much as named their name,
It would mean not them but you yourselves and shame,
And looking on their likeness he would see
Not them in prison cells but you and me
And would find recorded on their graveyard stone
That the death we meant for them became your own.
From The Condemned
by Witter Bynner
Yet history knows: to every age, its crimes;
Empires half-fledged cannot be wholly wise.
We shudder, learning to endure our times,
And from the threatened flood avert our eyes.
Our senses will applaud the world again.
But who can clap life into murdered men?
From Of Sacco and Vanzetti
by Babette Deutsch
Hugo Gellert and I. Klein
Louis Lozowick
Ours is the dominance of claws and not the grace
of fingers; ours is not the sweetness of a hand.
Almighty Bludgeon, we have been taught to hide thE
face when we have by thy might bestowed the wand.
From The Infamous Ritual
by Harry Alan Potamkin
May this dour land go back now whence it came
To early granite, to implacable sea. May there descend on it the cleansing flame
Of some remote supreme catastrophe Divorcing it forever with its shame From men who would be generous, wise and free.
From Prayer in Massachusetts
by Arthur Davison Ficke
All over the world people are hopefully, heartbrokenly
watching the Sacco-Vanzetti Case as a focus in the unending
fight for human rights of oppressed individuals and
masses against oppressing individuals and masses.
From Facing the Chair by John Dos Passo
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