The Literary Review
FOR HENRY KISSINGER
Is it too late to curse you, Henry?
Is it time to have the years obscure your crimes?
Time to close that chapter,
let bygones be gone, give it a rest, let it be?
No.
It is not too late, Henry.
And thus begins our curse:
Be it never too late,
be the voices you hear in your dotage
your victims’ shouting Assassin! Thief!
Because you sat well-tailored in handsome offices
and sent others out to prove your power,
because you wrote, “With proper tactics
nuclear war need not be as destructive as it appears”,
because you found white phosphorous a useful tool
and napalm a tolerable arm of diplomacy,
and agent orange necessary
to policy, and tiger cages,
because you didn’t understand why we should allow a country to go
communist on account of its own people’s ignorance,
because you enjoyed the company of Pinochet
Marcos, Duvalier, Stroessner, Somoza, the Shah,
because you regretted Laos and Cambodia—
“We should have found some other way of doing it”,
because you killed Allende and shattered Neruda’s heart
as surely as if you had held the gun yourself,
because you accepted the Nobel Peace Prize,
because in the mirror you see a god — Hermes, Loki,
because you have a mind for deciding life and death,
and it’s pure injustice of history that you’re not still doing it—
may the insects refuse to touch you, may the worms spit you back,
may you never know decay’s comfort and rest.
Let the voices follow you always.
Let the burning children run toward you forever
clasping you in their flaming arms.
Let your eternal waiting room be
the stadium in Santiago, filled with silent prisoners filing
past. Each one stops to look at you,
and you, with all the time in the world
cannot look away.
None mentions bruises, burns,
missing fingernails, teeth, faces,
each only recites a name —
Elena, Nguyen, Christofis, Bobby Jene, Laureano,
and one of them hands you a snapshot of his daughters,
another his unused high school registration card,
a third the unfinished history of her family,
a fourth holds out a stuffed penguin, won
at a carnival moments before his arrest,
the next carries nothing, having no hands,
gives you only her look, and whispers
a poem, a hymn to the wind.
The line of the disappeared goes on and on
and you will stand rooted,
seeing them at last. And always,
always will you hear the songs of love
Victor Jara continues to sing,
even without
his tongue.
- Christopher Hirschmann Brandt
LOVE AND SOLITUDE
Love makes solitude lonely
when the beloved is away
as words recited rhythmically
say more than they seem to say.
Lovers share their solitudes
quietly, together and apart,
they dream they hear the stars
sing in their common heart.
Love spans solitudes and seasons,
but death hums a one-note song –
the bridges remain half hung,
and the maps have all gone wrong.
Yet when least we expect it,
love shepherds all solitude
into a river of we, and we
and the long water collude
in singing out the joy of breath,
swimming in the face of death.
- Christopher Hirschmann Brandt
JOHN BALL’S BALLS
Old Father John Ball had a pair of brass balls,
in thirteen sixty he proclaimed
that in God’s creation humans all
were equal, all were made the same,
and only tyrants in a perverse cause
made one and not another a slave
in despite of God’s and Nature’s laws,
so said John Ball, who was very brave.
Then brave John Ball was duly tried,
drawn and quartered, still alive,
his balls cut off and hotly fried.
This shows us, lest we all be doomed,
though Ball is dead his thoughts yet thrive:
truth can even speak entombed.
- Christopher Hirschmann Brandt
Pregunta a los intelectuales
¿Porque
cuando llega la hora de hablar,
callais?
¿Acaso porque
a la hora de escuchar,
hablabais?
LOOKING AT THE LAST PHOTOGRAPH OF MARILYN MONROE
Coroners have skinned the face off Marilyn Monroe
and laid it back for one last shoot. They said:
“The facial discoloration occurred after death,
and it is the surgeon’s knife that caused her face to sag.
Before the procedure the lifeless Marilyn remained beautiful.”
But she knew beauty is death. They both
knew it, Marilyn and Norma Jean – for that’s
the woman in the photograph – the face of an ancient child.
Marilyn made beauty up out of what scares us.
She told us just what to expect.
We thought we owned her when she laid
the year out naked on red velvet.
But the itch we felt was dry finger-bones
flicking our balls till they’re dust and no trouble.
Every loss of love adds up at last to one.
She worked to make herself a memory:
the careful mask of red and pink that took
her hours every day, her late arrivals on the set,
the way she listened for what no one else could hear.
Here, her face takes back earth’s colors,
the change too fast for any word but death.
Doctors have smoothed the skin
and clicked and flashed
to get her down once more, forever,
but she’s gone home to Norma Jean,
who waited for years
in parks and soda counters,
sitting on busstop benches,
nested shopping bags at her feet,
her eyes pieces of sky
open to anything.
- Christopher Hirschmann Brandt
THE ENVELOPE – prose poem
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It crackles as I lift it out of a box I’d forgotten I had, and I’ve no idea what is inside that makes the crinkly sounds. The box, it turns out, holds some of my father’s old papers, essays mostly, diaries, notes for an unwritten novel – things I’ve been intending to read ever since his sudden death half a century ago. This is the first time in years I’ve looked into the box. On the back of the envelope, in his difficult Austrian schoolboy cursive, almost illegible except to him, “Given to me by a neighbor in Vienna in 1938 for good luck.” I open it. Inside is another envelope, of torn and discolored glassine, and inside that are a few dry and broken stalks of hay or grass. Suddenly the memory comes, Vati our Austrian daddy telling his three sons about December 1938. How his friend and university classmate came to be working in the Nazi propaganda ministry. How that man whispered to him, “Verschwinde. Dein Name ist auf der Liste” (Get out. Your name is on the list.) How he hid in a hayloft until that particular “Jew-hunt” was done. The family consultation. How he and his youngest sister got to Zagreb, then Trieste, then Genova. How they found a freighter bound for New York. How his parents and other sister followed in Spring. How none of them wanted to leave, so cut it almost too close.
xxx
But what of the straw stalks in the envelope? Were they from the loft where he’d hidden? Did the neighbor grab a handful of the straw that had concealed him, and say, “Hier, Hals und Beinbruch”? What are the lessons of history? Do they come as a surprise in a glassine envelope? It has been at least fifty years since anyone has even thought of it – where was it all that time? Did it exist at all, without someone to perceive it? What is it to me, now, this straw in glassine? It is older than I am. It was handled by my father. It recalls his history which is also mine. It tethers me to all who have gone before me. To all I never knew, all those who died, were murdered, or survived, as he did. So I will keep this handful of straw, this envelope full of history, and pass it on to generations of family.
- Christopher Hirschmann Brandt
A question for the intellectuals
Why
when it is time to take a stand
do you hold your tongues?
Is it because
when it was time to listen
you were talking?
- Christopher Hirschmann Brandt