| |
| HE lived on the wings of storm. | |
| The ashes are in Chihuahua. | |
| |
| Out of Ludlow and coal towns in Colorado | |
| Sprang a vengeance of Slav miners, Italians, Scots, Cornishmen, Yanks. | |
| Killings ran under the spoken commands of this boy | 5 |
| With eighty men and rifles on a hogback mountain. | |
| |
| They killed swearing to remember | |
| The shot and charred wives and children | |
| In the burnt camp of Ludlow, | |
| And Louis Tikas, the laughing Greek, | 10 |
| Plugged with a bullet, clubbed with a gun butt. | |
| |
| As a home war | |
| It held the nation a week | |
| And one or two million men stood together | |
| And swore by the retribution of steel. | 15 |
| |
| It was all accidental. | |
| He lived flecking lint off coat lapels | |
| Of men he talked with. | |
| He kissed the miners’ babies | |
| And wrote a Denver paper | 20 |
| Of picket silhouettes on a mountain line. | |
| |
| He had no mother but Mother Jones | |
| Crying from a jail window of Trinidad: | |
| “All I want is room enough to stand | |
| And shake my fist at the enemies of the human race.” | 25 |
| |
| Named by a grand jury as a murderer | |
| He went to Chihuahua, forgot his old Scotch name, | |
| Smoked cheroots with Pancho Villa | |
| And wrote letters of Villa as a rock of the people. | |
| |
| How can I tell how Don Magregor went? | 30 |
| |
| Three riders emptied lead into him. | |
| He lay on the main street of an inland town. | |
| A boy sat near all day throwing stones | |
| To keep pigs away. | |
| |
| The Villa men buried him in a pit | 35 |
| With twenty Carranzistas. | |
| |
| There is drama in that point… | |
| …the boy and the pigs. | |
| Griffith would make a movie of it to fetch sobs. | |
| Victor Herbert would have the drums whirr | 40 |
| In a weave with a high fiddle-string’s single clamor. | |
| |
| “And the muchacho sat there all day throwing stones | |
| To keep the pigs away,” wrote Gibbons to the Tribune. | |
| |
| Somewhere in Chihuahua or Colorado | |
| Is a leather bag of poems and short stories. | 45 |
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