New Poetry by Vern Fein

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.