George & Rue: Pure, Virtuous Killers
George & Rue: Pure, Virtuous Killers
Original Text
Execution Poems (Wolfville, NS: Gaspereau Press, 2001): 12.
1They were hanged back-to-back in York County Gaol.
2They were rough dreamers, raw believers, set out like killers.
3They sprouted in Newport Station, Hants County, Nova Scotia, in 1925 and 1926.
4They smacked a white taxi driver, Silver, with a hammer, to sack his silver.
5They bopped Silver and hit backwoods New Brunswick in his black cab.
6They slew him in the first hour of January 8, 1949, A.D.
7They were clear Negro, and semi-Micmac.
8They tooled all night between Fredericton and Saint John with Silver
9coiled -- a void noose -- in the trunk.
10They had face-to-face trials in May 1949 and backed each other's guilt.
11George Albert Hamilton confessed -- to theft -- and mated the Sally Anne.
12Rufus James Hamilton polished his refined, mint, silver-bright English.
13They were dandled from a gallows in the third hour of July 27, 1949, A.D.
14They were my cousins, dead a decade before I was born.
15My bastard phantasms, my dastard fictions.
RPO poem Editors
Ian Lancashire
RPO Edition
2004
Special Copyright
<b>This poem cannot be published anywhere without the written consent of George Elliott Clarke or the Gaspereau Press permissions department.</b>