Monday June 11 1:19 PM ET

A Poem at Sunrise Marks Death of Oklahoma Bomber

By Michael Conlon

TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (Reuters) - The dawn that Timothy McVeigh did not see painted the sky with puffy cumulus clouds and a fading half-moon, but in death the Oklahoma City bomber greeted the end of night with a defiant 126-year-old Victorian poem.

``Out of the night that covers me

Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.''

The words of British poet William Ernest Henley's ''Invictus,'' as written on a piece of paper in McVeigh's leftward-slanting print, rang out over loud speakers in a meadow in front of the prison where he was executed, within minutes of his death on Monday at 7:14 a.m. local time.

They were read by a reporter who was among 10 news media witnesses to the execution of the man who committed the 1995 bombing that killed 168 men, women and children.

McVeigh, 33, had titled the poem his ``Final Written Statement'' and its verses resounded over several hundred news media members assembled to hear the details of his death.

``In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.''

That McVeigh employed Henley's 1875 poem about the invincibility of the human spirit was not a surprise, since he had cited it in the past.

What was not expected what that he chose to make his final remarks in writing, remaining silent when asked for his last words as he lay strapped to a gurney waiting for a dose of lethal
chemicals that ended his life within minutes.

But the poet's defiant words that echoed across the dew-softened Indiana meadow in front of the U.S. Penitentiary near Terre Haute did not travel far enough to reach two camps of demonstrators who had spent much of the night condemning the death penalty or waiting with anticipation for it to be carried out.

``Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds, shall find me, unafraid.''

About 200 capital punishment foes were kept about two blocks away, in the same meadow but out of earshot of the massive media encampment of tents and satellite trucks at the main prison
gate.

When the time of the first execution carried out by the federal government since 1963 arrived, they rose, stood in concentric circles and sang the civil rights anthem ``We Shall Overcome.''

A bedsheet banner with blood-like handprints hung near them proclaiming ``Don't Kill In Our Names.''

Further along in the same field, a group of those supporting the execution shouted a ``10-9-8...'' countdown as the time for execution approached, then broke into cheers and taunts of ``Die
McVeigh, Die!'' and ``This is for the people in Oklahoma!''

``It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate;

I am the captain of my soul.''

There was no reply outside the prison to the lofty words McVeigh had appropriated for his epitaph. But a down-to-earth one came from Oklahoma City where bombing victim Raymond Washburn was among the survivors of the blast who watched McVeigh die in a closed circuit television feed.

He was, Washburn said, a ``coward and lowdown bastard.''

-----