Ethel Rosenberg

•

The inventor of the electric chair
was a dentist.
And I wonder,
what did his ghost say to you, Ethel,
the day they strapped you in?

What did the leather straps smell like,
or did it matter?
Did any of it matter, those months
in the jail cell, innocent?
You were captured like a beetle
beneath a mason jar,
just so your husband would plead guilty;
you were a piece of meat as collateral.
He would not confess and neither would you.

You were unAmerican and I love you for that;
you lived and loved like a communist.
Your husband was too gullible
and your brother too selfish.
It was a tragedy Ethel,
when the Judge sentenced you and your husband to death
by electric chair.

How many times did they shock you?
How many times did you whisper 'I love you'
into the lonely space of your cell,
or between bars,
how many times did you imagine his lips,
even then, with his red-handed ways;
how many times?
I think of you, with beyond-grave messages.
Ethel, you loved too freely,
and that frightened everyone into witch hunts
and baskets full of hate.
It scared everyone,
an entire nation,
wanting your death; mimicking the saliva
of cannibals.

Your children fight for you now.
I fight for you now.
Because you told them
and you tell me;
Life is worth living
and grief is a consolation;
our convictions will always
defeat the executioner,
even in death.

Julius, your husband, was seated first,
in this concoction derived from a dentist.
Everything seems so trivial in the face
of your husband's death.
Why did they make you watch?
The first set of juice left him unconscious,
the next two cooked his organs,
his lips swelled the size of peach slices;
too large and reminiscent of peace lilies to kiss.
You would've kissed him anyway if they had let you.
And then his body jumped as if alive,
as if tethered to a kite, with each rise of voltage.
Death like this one,
can cause self-hatred
among lightning.
And then you were next.
Sorrowful and thinking of your children.
We always think of our children at times like these.

Nine times
You were so little without being fragile
and these electrodes were too big for you,
usually made for men,
not poor, jewish, secretary, mothers.
No.
Nine times, they flipped the switch,
to kill you, but
your heart kept beating,
because even then, you loved hard enough
to destroy lightning.
Even then.
You understood the executioner
and Joe McCarthy;
you knew the souless blink of your Judge.
You knew them all,
and I ask, just once;
could you forgive them,
could you forgive your brother
for convicting you of treason
to save his own family?
Did you forgive them,
or could you only think of your orphaned children?

We always think of our children.