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.