Madame Popova

**Based on the life of Madame Alexe Popova, a serial killer for hire whose sympathies lay with wives of brutes. She committed some 300 murders of husbands in the span of 30 years, until she was reported by a repentant wife to the police, to whom she remorselessly confessed her crimes, claiming that she'd freed "unhappy wives from their tyrants." She was executed in 1909.**


Madame Popova heard, 
with heart breaking 
beneath a rigid-faced guise,
the woman before her who spoke
through tears, aching 
of bruises and swollen black eyes.

When her tale was all told, Madame Popova rose;
with pity and fury she said,
"No more will you hurt. Take courage, dear lady!
Your troubles will lie with the dead!"

Madame Popova invited the lady
and her "troubles" to an afternoon tea,
and into the cup of the latter 
she slipped 
several drops 
of arsenic.
Then the lady thanked god to be free!

Three hundred such incidents, three decades later,
blindfolded, face turned to the sky,
said Madame Popova, "I do not regret
the liberty of any tyrannized wife."


Thus, guiltless she passed from waking to rest.
The firing squad put a hole in her breast
and she breathed
not again; that was
the end
of the Madame Popova's life.