Trading tobacco now with fellow inmates forbidden to talk to him.
Colored mostly, soldiers fighting for a country
That hardly fought for them. Taken away like Louis Till after
3:00 a.m. line-ups to be hung for murder and rape.
Not even 3 weeks in the gorilla cage could keep Ezra from
Praising Il Duce in 11 lines on a piece of toilet paper
And later writing his cantos on a table made from a packing crate
By H.H. Edwards who had they said had "gotten the charity."
Would Ezra or anyone have guessed that 10 years later
Louis Till's 14-year-old son would be brutally murdered
For the crime of whistling at a white woman in a store
In Mississippi, where a jury declared the accused innocent?
After the trial, though, they were happy to brag to a magazine
About what they had done as if they had done no wrong.
Distinguished Senators Stennis and Eastland looked, then, at
Louis' hanging and announced themselves satisfied that the
Same bad blood flowed in the veins of the son as the father.
Originally posted April 11, 2011.
(Emmett Till would have been 75 years old today.)
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