A crucifixion
but the cross is a threatened man.
A bleeding victim clings to him.
In the foreground another sprawls,
nearly dead, trying to rise.

The painter positions us
face on to them
in the final moment
we could intervene
before the irreversible end.

Night in a stony place.
Flaring torches, from the right,
cast into the frame
only the posse’s shadows
yet we know these men.

Everything in sepia
except the blood.
Worst of all
is that shadow-infiltrated space
which is the last of safety.

The stalwart man, in profile,
looks across that gap
not in heroic self-assertion but
chin down, with the sombre, measuring regard
a mirror offers to appalling times.

Chaney, a Black local,
and Schwerner and Goodman,
New York Jews, beaten and shot;
Chaney castrated;
Goodman buried alive.

The Deputy Sheriff told the Klan,
You’ve struck a blow for the White man…
You’ve let those agitating outsiders
know where this state stands.
Go home now and forget it.*

Those we treat the worst
we loathe the most
because they’ve seen our ugliest of faces.
The unforgiveable sin.
Nothing’s too bad for them.

*This quotation is attributed to Deputy Sheriff, Cecil Ray Price in Murder in Mississippi by Howard Ball.

This poem was written in response to the painting Murder In Mississippi by Norman Rockwell.

Angela Graham was a runner-up in the 2025 Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing. Culture & Democracy Press will publish her third poetry collection, Exposure, 75 poems on war, media and democracy in February 2026, having published her second, Star in 2024. Her 2022 poetry collection, Sanctuary: There Must Be Somewhere and 2020 short stories, A City Burning (Edge Hill Prize longlisted), are from Seren Books. Angela is from Northern Ireland. She won the Poetry Prize in the inaugural Linen Hall Ulster-Scots Writing Competition, 2021. She has had an award-winning career as a film maker and screenwriter in Wales. In 2022 she received an Honorary Life Fellowship from the Institute of Welsh Affairs for her work on media and democracy.