Stephen Gibson
A Brief History at Cotton Mather’s Tomb in Copp’s Hill Burying Ground in Boston
From Salem, not his grave in this cemetery,
you could almost hear the witches nearby
in Danvers village being hanged from trees—
nothing they could say would convince a jury
they weren’t screwing sleeping men as succubi—
we visited Salem; now, his grave in this cemetery.
They never had a “third nipple” on their bodies—
for their “devil’s teat”—but how do you deny
what’s not there? They got hanged from trees.
Cotton repeats this “evidence,” which he believes
and doesn’t really want to question—or even try:
Salem’s deaths belong in his grave in this cemetery.
Cotton would later be accused of witchcraft when he
urged smallpox inoculation for Boston—and the country
(remember, decades before, witches hanged from trees)—
claiming a small dose of disease prevented worse disease:
his African slave explained his pox scar, and he didn’t die.
Black lives mattered, even back to a grave in this cemetery
where a born-again white guy justified hangings in trees.
Stephen Gibson is the author of Self-Portrait in a Door-Length Mirror (University of Arkansas Press, 2017) winner of the Miller Williams Prize. His previous collections include The Garden of Earthly Delights Book of Ghazals (Texas Review Press, 2016); Rorschach Art Too (Story Line Press, 2014), winner of the Donald Justice Poetry Prize sponsored by the Iris N. Spencer Poetry Awards of the West Chester University Poetry Center; Paradise (University of Arkansas Press, 2011), a finalist for the Miller Williams prize; Frescoes (Lost Horse Press, 2011); Masaccio’s Expulsion (MARGIE/IntuiT House, 2008), selected and introduced by Andrew Hudgins; and Rorschach Art (Red Hen Press, 2001). His poems have appeared in Agni, Barrow Street, Bellevue Literary Review, The Paris Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, The Sewanee Review, and The Yale Review, and other publications. He lives in West Palm Beach, Florida.
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