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.