Daily Archives: September 22, 2026

September 22, 2026

Poetry for the Worst Day of the Salem Witch Trials

By daseger

On this day in 1692, eight people were executed in Salem after being found guilty of witchcraft. In Theodore Spencer’s 1945 poem, “Salem, 1692: Cantata for Mixed Chorus,” they are a chorus:

(And he seems to have forgotten Martha Corey).

For most of the year, I don’t really indulge in much thought about the Salem Witch Trials to be honest with you. My historical inclinations are all about discovery, and the Salem story is pretty well-established. Here in Salem, it is told over and over and over again, with the same tangents on ergot and land disputes “explored” intermittently yet repetitively. The repetition is deadening. But because I live here, I live with the presence of the trials, and so it’s an annual marker for me to think about the victims on this, the worst day. It occurred to me as I was walking around an already-busy downtown last week that the I’m not really living with the presence of the trials anymore, but rather some dimmed-down extraction or variation or actually I think I’m going to go with corrosive corruption: it’s really not about 1692 here, even though that date is emblazoned on everything. It’s just about whatever witches and spooky stuff. Samantha from Bewitched, the ladies of Hocus Pocus, any witch will do, which I supposed I should be happy about since the victims of 1692 were not witches. But why do I feel that they have been forgotten, even erased?

See the difference the date makes? My well-worn They were not witches sign on the right, and a sign from the Peabody Essex Museum shop. The PEM has disdained capitalization of the witch trials for decades but now is all in—their current ad campaign is something! The date is key; it makes a sign a souvenir, you can put it on a sweatshirt.

As I’ve discovered several times this year, the antidote for not feeling close or deep enough to or about someone or something is poetry, so I have three poets to recommend to those who wish to engage in more earnest remembrance of the Salem victims. Their poems are so poignant that they will stay in your head and give you strength even as you walk by the absolute tackiest witch shop in Salem.

First up is Nicole Cooley, whose Afflicted Girls (LSU Press, 2004) I discovered even before my recent poetry kick. Her Salem poems were inspired by a residential fellowship she spent at the American Antiquarian Association, and that archival perspective is particularly appealing to me. Here’s an opening poem, and she gets more entangled from here!

Cindy Veach, my second poet, lives locally and gets just as riled up about the commercialization of the Salem tragedy as I do though she is far more eloquent: check out her award-winning “Witch Kitsch” and this snippet from a great poem about feeding the parking meter on Essex Street in Salem on a freezing midwinter night:

Trials and hangings on repeat. Veach’s poetry is much more about remembrance than rage. She explores the lives and deaths of all the Salem victims in two recent books, Innocents (Nixes Mate) and Her Kind (CavanKerry Press)giving us poetical characterizations which read to me as reinstatement at this time of year in Salem. If you want to counter celebratory Salem 2026 with probings of the human tragedy of Salem 1692, these are the books for you. Here is her poem about Wilmot Redd, a victim of the worst day:

My last poet, wrote a book of poems about historical Marys! In Mary’s Dust (Entre Rios Books, 2017), Melinda Mueller explores a word-world of historical Marys beginning with the Virgin and including Mary Easty, who died on this day in 1692. The poem proceeds (recedes) backwards from Easty’s journey into the afterlife to the night before her execution. Much of the imagery is not pleasant, but of course nothing that happened to those “eight firebrands from hell” was. Flung with the others into crevices among the rocks.