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Thursday, July 02, 2015

KLANSMEN

by William Ruleman



The self-proclaimed largest Ku Klux Klan group in America plans to rally outside the South Carolina statehouse next month, state officials confirmed. --The Washington Post, June 30, 2015



Good Christian men in white
Ride into the night
To keep their women pure
And families secure.

Good Christian men in white
Know that they are right
But tend to wait till dark
Before they will embark

(Good Christian men in white),
For their own brand of might
Tends not to thrive by day
On what mild judges say.

Good Christian men in white
Wake to see dawn light,
Their white robes stained in mud,
Stallions’ foam, and blood.


William Ruleman’s poems have appeared in many journals, including The Galway Review, The New English Review, The New Verse News, The Pennsylvania Review, The Recusant, The Road Not Taken, Rubies in the Darkness, The Sonnet Scroll, and Trinacria. His books include two collections of his own poems (A Palpable Presence and Sacred and Profane Loves, both from Feather Books), as well as translations of poems from Rilke’s Neue Gedichte (WillHall Books, 2003), of Stefan Zweig’s fiction in Vienna Spring: Early Novellas and Stories (Ariadne Press, 2010), of prose and poems by Zweig in A Girl and the Weather (Cedar Springs Books, 2014), and of poems by the German Romantics in Verse for the Journey: Poems on the Wandering Life (also from Cedar Springs Books). He is Professor of English at Tennessee Wesleyan College.