For Raoul Wallenberg
I am baffled and beset
by the long braid of another man’s fate.
For how hours, days, months, years
did he sit it out, isolated, hoping,
then not hoping, praying, then not praying,
a man of the first courage, defeated,
the rescuer of many and many, abandoned
to the oubliette, his lifeline cut off,
gone deep into the pit, left to rot?
Officially, he was dead, unofficially
sporadic rumors circulated.
He’d been sighted in a prison infirmary
ten years in;
he’d tapped out his name on a cell wall
twenty years in;
he’d been examined in a psychiatric clinic
thirty years in, reported
“in poor condition.”
I have seen pictured unforgivable things:
a cat crucified on a row house door;
a man chained to a wall by an iron collar;
a man turned on a spit over fire in an isolated cell’;
But this my mind’s eye refuses: waiting
and more waiting, and waiting until waiting
no longer knows what it waits for; energy,
daring, resolve – mis en bouteille
in the Lubyanka, stored in its cellars,
after, discarded. At some point, one thinks,
blackness descended, enveloped, did not lift.
He is memorialized in the capitol of the country where he was born,
and which failed him.
He is memorialized in the capitol of the country where he died,
and which murdered him piecemeal.
To Stockholm & Moscow, add Budapest,
the city where his life was life behind,
after men and women in the tens of thousands
earmarked for the extermination machine
were delivered through his unstinting address.
This is the short list.
Vienna, Sydney, London, Buenos Aires… it goes on.
He is an honorary citizen
of the United States.
He is an honorary citizen
of Canada,
At Yad Vashem
he is first among equals.
It does not compensate. In a hundred years
it will not compensate.
Until hell is emptied the debt is not paid.