Born Yesterday

You will eat, bye and bye,

You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.

—Joe Hill

The empyrean is a realm of fire,

Where God and His purported angels dwell,

Your shrinking heart’s secret desire;

What you in deep confusion debit, hell.

We were all of us born yesterday,

And cogitating draw our own conclusions.

Informing knowledge has too brief a stay;

Believing what it pleases one to think: delusions.

We’re not all that wrong, though, I'd say,

To deny the earthly terrors

Spelled out by what many've thought before

Fleeing this Comedy of Errors:

Tom Fools, harkening to the quire/choir,

We see only what we're meant to see,

Claiming the inheritance we require;

Hoping the end's not soon to be.

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,

Alive as you or me.

“They shot you, Joe,” says I.

“Takes more than guns to kill a man.

“I never died,” says he.

Believe that, too, if it's what you wish.

We Wobblies can't survive time's organizing fire,

And guns kill men. How could they not?

Millions have died here, on this very spot.

Framed for murders he almost certainly did not commit, the Swedish American songwriter and Industrial Workers of the World (IWW; aka"the Wobblies") militant Joe Hill (aka Joseph Hillström) was executed by firing squad in a prison at Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1915.

Friday, July 25, 2025