“My only one!In your last letter "My head aches my heart is stunned!" you say."If they hang you, if I lose you;" you say; "I can't live!"You'll live my dearest wife, like a black smoke in the wind my memory will vanish;you'll live, the red-haired sister of my heartat most one year it lasts in the twentieth century the grief of death..Deatha dead body swinging on a rope.My heart doesn't accept such a death..Butbe sure that, my love,if some pitiable gypsy's hairy black spider like hand slips the rope around my neck,to see the fear in my blue eyes they'll look in vain at Nâzım!And I,in the twilight of my last morning,shall see my friends and you,and carry only the griefof an unfinished song to the soil...My wife!Good hearted,golden coloured,with eyes sweeter than honey, my bee;why did I write you that they want to hang me,the trial is in the first stepand they don't pluck like a turnip the head of a man.Come, forget them all.These are so far away probabilities.If you have some money buy me a flannel underwear,my sciatica is acting up.And don't forget that alwaysthere should be good thoughts in the mind of a prisoner's wife.”

“MY WOMAN My woman came with me as far as Brest,she got off the train and stayed on the platform,she grew smaller and smaller,she became a kernel of wheat in the infinite blue,then all I could see were the tracks. Then she called out from Poland, but I couldn't answer,I couldn't ask, "Where are you, my rose, where are you?""Come," she said, but I couldn't reach her,the train was going like it would never stop,I was choking with grief. Then patches of snow were rotting on sandy earth,and suddenly I knew my woman was watching :"Did you forget me," she asked, "did you forget me?"Spring marched with muddy bare feet on the sky. Then stars lighted on the telegraph wires,darkness dashed the train like rain,my woman stood under the telegraph poles,her heart pounding as if she were in my arms,the poles kept disappearing, she didn't move,the train was going like it would never stop,I was choking with grief. Then suddenly I knew I'd been on that train for years- I'm still amazed at how or why I knew it -and always singing the same great song of hope,I'm forever leaving the cities and women I love,and carrying my losses like wounds opening inside me,I'm getting closer, closer to somewhere.”

“You Are My DrunkennessYou are my drunkenness... I did not sober up, as if I can do that; I don't want to anyway. I have a headache, my knees are full of scars I am in mud all around I struggle to walk towards your hesitant light.”

“No," he said. "Relius was right and I was wrong. You are My Queen. Even though you cut my head from my shoulders, with my last breath as a noose tightens, to the last beat of my heart if I hang from the walls of the palace, you are My Queen. That I have failed you does not change my love for you or my loyalty.”

“I never thought of it like that. I always thought of you as a part of me, like my own eyes or my own hands. You don't go around thinking 'I love my eyes, I love my hands', do you? But think what it would be like to live without your eyes or your hands. To be mad, or to be blind. I can't talk about it. It's how I feel.”

“But now what? Why, now comes my master, takes me right away from my work, and my friends, and all I like, and grinds me down into the very dirt! And why? Because, he says, I forgot who I was; he says, to teach me that I am only a nigger! After all, and last of all, he comes between me and my wife, and says I shall give her up, and live with another woman. And all this your laws give him power to do, in spite of God or man. Mr. Wilson, look at it! There isn't one of all these things, that have broken the hearts of my mother and my sister, and my wife and myself, but your laws allow, and give every man power to do, in Kentucky, and none can say to him nay! Do you call these the laws of my country? Sir, I haven't any country, anymore than I have any father. But I'm going to have one. I don't want anything of your country, except to be let alone,--to go peaceably out of it; and when I get to Canada, where the laws will own me and protect me, that shall be my country, and its laws I will obey. But if any man tries to stop me, let him take care, for I am desperate. I'll fight for my liberty to the last breath I breathe. You say your fathers did it; if it was right for them, it is right for me!”

“Please take your time. I want you to kill me slowly so I can write my lastpoem to my wife's heart. They laughed, and took from meonly the words dedicated to my wife's heart.”