Lincoln Laughed First
Particularly memorable were his words to a young woman whose deep interest in a hospitalised soldier led her to press the question:
“Where were you wounded?”
The infantryman, who had been shot through the testicles, repeatedly deflected her inquiry with the answer: “At Antietam.”
After she asked the president to assist her, Lincoln talked privately with the soldier and then took the young woman’s hands in his own, explaining:
“My dear girl, the ball that hit him, would have missed you.”
An august occasion—
the Cabinet tense
like Civil War soldiers
hidden behind trees
waiting for a life or death volley.
But Lincoln did not
spread out the scroll
of the Emancipation Proclamation
as the room expected.
Instead, that oak-tree, strong man
took a news article from his pocket
and began to read Artemus Ward,
a humor writer from Cleveland
who made Lincoln laugh
though slavery was not funny at all.
He knew it and steely-eyed
stared down the grimaces and grunts
in that room and this bumpkin president
read an article he found funny
about a hayseed performer bashing
in the head of a Judas figurine
at a carnival show.
Lincoln, notorious for telling jokes,
laughed first and told
the disapproving eyes
if he did not laugh
before he pronounced,
he would die
and that they needed
the same medicine
as much as he did.
Then he ended slavery
in the rebel states,
which was no laughing matter.
- © Vern Fein 2022
A retired special education teacher, Vern Fein has published over two hundred poems on over ninety different sites, a few being: *82 Review, Bindweed Magazine, Gyroscope Review, Courtship of Winds, Young Raven's Review, Blue Pepper, Monterey Poetry Review, and Green Silk Review. His first poetry book—I WAS YOUNG AND THOUGHT IT WOULD CHANGE—was published by Cyberwit Press.
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